In Italy there existed a sort of golden age of exhibitions, full of events of international scope and the result of prestigious collaborations and full-bodied loan campaigns, which today is inexorably over, the accomplice of an autarchy into which ou...
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Antonio Iommelli (Naples, 1985) has been director of the Civic Museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza since July of last year. An art historian and scholar of the Baroque, before taking on this important position he worked for three years at the Gall...
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Immense was the dismay caused, in August 1877, by the news of the death of Francesco Mosso, a talented painter from Turin who had passed away at the age of only twenty-nine. The tone of the obituaries was always the same: who knows what he would have...
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Ancient is the problem of the correct framing of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his production: the long sequence of exhibitions that have been dedicated to him has looked, often almost exclusively, toward one part of his production, that of advertisi...
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Needless to get around it: they have a problem with exhibitions in Livorno . After last year's lousy Banksy show , a laughable parade of twenty-six multiples by the British street artist that replicated a format already seen and revised far and wide ...
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Last Feb. 15, the Leonardo3 Museum in Milan opened a new interactive wall that brings together, on a large screen, all of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, which can be viewed and explored in depth. For theoccasion, Professor Martin Kemp, a British art ...
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An artist who looked to tradition, always true to himself, the author of devout, compassed and measured paintings while painting exploded around him. For these reasons, as well as for the fact that he was neglected, perhaps deliberately, by Giorgio V...
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Destroyed by illness and pain, rebellious in attitude, detached from the world and everyday life, an artist of the finest genius defeated by life. On February 8, 1943, Raphael Gambogi took leave of the world: alone, poor, desperate, ravaged by alcoho...
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Vittorio Sereni was convinced that passion for sports was a kind of grand allegory of life. And that the "soccer league cheer," as he, an avid Inter fan, called it, found its root in the overlap between the temperament of the fan and the "figure" tha...
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Is there really a gulf separating Italy's exhibition offerings from those of countries like France or even the Netherlands? While in Paris hordes of visitors, including Italians, remain enraptured among the rooms of the Rothko exhibition at the Fonda...
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If an ancient church becomes a venue for contemporary art exhibitions, how blurry is the line between a layout that respects its spaces and one that is instead heavy and invasive to the point of spoiling the perception of the spaces? Increasingly, bu...
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To get an idea of the way in which Serafino Macchiati understood his relationship with art, one might turn to a letter that, from Paris, the artist from the Marche region sent to Livorno, addressed to Benvenuto Benvenuti, in the aftermath of an exhib...
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Even an acclaimed contemporary artist like David Hockney can perhaps be included in the ranks of Giovanni Battista Moroni's admirers. But even should one deem it excessive to burden him with the label of enthusiast, it is still safe to say that Hockn...
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Perhaps the most suitable nickname for Matteo Civitali'sAnnunciata was found by Carlo Pedretti: in 1998 he compared some sheets by Leonardo da Vinci with the sweet little Renaissance Madonnina by the great sculptor from Lucca, and called her "the mai...
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The very recent exploit of Costantino D'Orazio as curator of ancient art exhibitions has caused great surprise: the well-known essayist, contemporary art historian, popularizer and television personality who has been on the shields for years, and for...
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In the church of Albissola Marina, the parish church of Our Lady of Concord, there is a beautiful painted nativity scene, from the 16th century, placed near the altar. And so far so good: there are countless churches that at some point present the fa...
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Not much has been heard about the many initiatives organized for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Galileo Chini's birth, and it is not difficult to understand the reasons why: these are mainly situations linked to the cities most marked by...
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From Russia to Italy, where he immediately made his mark despite his very young age: we are talking about Vladimir Kartashov, a Russian artist born in 1997 in Novosibirsk, Siberia. He moved very young to the far east of Siberia, to Magadan, growing u...
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Scipione, who was the most tormented, poetic and passionate painter of the Roman School of the 1930s, signed one of the most intense pages of criticism on El Greco ever written. Scipione can be reproached for a lack of originality, since he wrote abo...
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"Turner should come to Rome [...]. Here his genius would find bread for his teeth." The consideration was expressed by Sir Thomas Lawrence, an English painter who was residing in Italy at the time, and who in a letter of July 1819 confided to Joseph ...
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Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, will leave after eight years the museum he has directed since 2015. Schmidt, a German from Freiburg im Breisgau, born in 1968, is among the first cohort of directors of autonomous institutes created under the 201...
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I think the best assessment of the exhibition Pittura italiana oggi, the large group show that brings together the work of 120 painters at the Milan Triennale, is the sense of surprise that Davide Ferri notes in his essay published in the exhibition ...
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The surface changes over time and centuries, but the substance of art remains the same, is immutable, is eternal. Umberto Boccioni realized this shortly after his arrival in Milan in 1907, having just visited the Last Supper and been impressed by Leo...
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Until Feb. 4, 2024, Palazzo Reale in Milan is hosting the exhibition Morandi 1890 - 1964, one of the most comprehensive shows ever dedicated to one of the greatest Italian artists of the 20th century, Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890 - 1964). The exhib...
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"When you are in Palodes, announce that the Great Pan is dead." A voice rises from the island of Paxos that stuns all the passengers on the ship: it is directed to Thamus, the Egyptian helmsman. On the ship people wonder if they should disregard the ...
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Defining what a journey is is a rather simple task, at least on appearances: usually "journey" is understood to mean moving from the place where one resides, permanently or temporarily, to another place, which one imagines is mostly far away or at th...
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The last performance. The final act. The final farewell. On the most unlikely stage. Felicitations. Forty years after the release of Orthodoxy and twenty years after the last reunion, CCCP - Fedeli alla Linea find themselves together again, among the...
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Death of criticism. Disappearance of criticism. Crisis of criticism. It has been talked about so much, and for so long, that by putting together everything that has come out on the subject in the last thirty years, one might think of starting a new l...
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Until Dec. 6, 2023, Peter Campus (New York, 1937), one of the fathers of video art and among the most significant exponents of this expressive form ever, is the protagonist of the solo exhibition Myoptiks held at the Carlocinque Gallery in Milan (all...
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It was 1986 and Fabrizio Plessi brought to the Venice Biennale that year one of his most famous installations, Bronx, indebted to a certain extent to the art of Nam June Paik: twenty-six televisions arranged inside an iron structure, with the monitor...
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For the past few weeks, there has been discussion in the United States around a lengthy article by Sean Tatol, founder of the website Manhattan Art Review, on which the young critic reviews, with epigraphic and pungent writing, and always assigning a...
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It took shape in the fall of three years ago the idea of circulating the works of the Uffizi in the territory, among local communities, in places less known to tourism: we were in the midst of the forced cohabitation with Covid, ideas for more sustai...
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The occasion of the conference Towards a Culture for All, which will be held in the Salone di Cinquecento of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence next Tuesday, September 19, at 10 a.m., and which will deal with policies of access to culture, offers an opportu...
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We live in the palliative society, argues Byung-chul Han. A society that has removed pain from the horizon of one's experiences, a society that tries to hide pain in every way, a society that has elected personal happiness as the supreme good to the ...
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Rummaging through the many communiqués that reach the editorial office every day, I learned that this year Mantua's Festivaletteratura will dedicate two meetings to Carla Lonzi, a fundamental art critic and unparalleled theorist of second-wave fem...
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Rarely do we find, in mid-nineteenth-century painting, paintings imbued with an immediate, almost shameless eroticism, such as that which permeates Max Klinger's Triton and Nereid , the German artist's most famous painting, a work that still manages ...
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We are less than two years away from the 50th anniversary of the National Archaeological Museum of Vulci, an institute of rare merit that was opened to the public in 1975, with its headquarters in the imposing Castello della Badia, a severe fortress ...
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Antonio Maria Viani was the prefect of the ducal factories in Mantua when his colleague Domenico Fetti portrayed him, in 1618, in a large canvas that was part of a cycle devoted to the life of Margherita Gonzaga, sister of Duke Vincenzo I: the noblew...
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If there is to be found a real havoc that threatens to be wrought around the redevelopment of Rome's Via dei Fori Imperiali, it could be nimbly identified in the maintenance of the status quo. It must be premised, of course, that a smoky blanket shro...
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From Aug. 11 to Nov. 5, The Project Space gallery in Pietrasanta hosts the exhibition "The Blind Leading the Dead" by Jake & Dinos Chapman: protagonists of the latest revolution in European art, the Chapman brothers represent the most provocative...
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Wind, cicadas, calm. The ruins of the monastery of San Bruzio stand on the rounded hump of a soft knoll, hidden among the fields, along the provincial road that leads from the castle of Marsiliana to the village of Magliano, still tightly packed in t...
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Strong concerns have been raised about the decision by the board of directors of the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa not to renew the appointment of director Serena Bertolucci. It must be said that so much has changed in the past year in the shadow of the Gr...
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Dating back to 1999 was Leandro Erlich's debut in a U.S. gallery. The Argentine artist, now risen to the heights of international fame, was twenty-three years old at the time and presented himself at the Kent Gallery in New York with an installation,...
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Seventy precise years separate the first modern monographic exhibition on Luca Signorelli, the one held in 1953 first in Cortona and then in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, from the more recent one, namely the one organized this year for the 500th anniv...
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Writing about the Cesio panel, an extravagant apex of the Renaissance in Liguria, now preserved in the highly prized Diocesan Museum in Albenga, art historian Mauro Natale had spoken of an "absolute exception": it was not in fact customary for such a...
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The last flames that, the day before yesterday, enveloped Michelangelo Pistoletto's monumental-scale replica of the Venus of rags had yet to be extinguished, but on social media and the online editions of all newspapers, local and national, comments ...
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"Unclassifiable." This is the adjective, simple but extremely eloquent and fitting, that a few years ago Eskil Lam found to describe the art of his father, Wifredo Lam. There is perhaps no definition that better fits this artist so out of the ordinar...
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Browsing through a nineteenth-century art history textbook, it will not be difficult to come across the name of Alfredo d'Andrade, the great Portuguese-born (full name was Alfredo Cesar Reis Freire de Andrade) but naturalized Italian architect whom w...
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Examined by scratching the surface a little, the seventh edition of White Carrara, the festival that has enlivened the start of summers in the historic center of the city of the marbles since 2017, looks a lot like a Monicelli film. It resembles the ...
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The exhibition Renaissance in Ferrara. Ercole de' Roberti and Lorenzo Costa, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi and Michele Danieli (in Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, from February 18 to June 19, 2023), is one of the most significant of the year, as well as ...
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Florence owes much of its late Baroque facies to a Neapolitan. If there had been no Luca Giordano, who knows what paths the great decoration of the early 18th century in Florence would have taken: perhaps, spectacular frescoes such as Giuseppe Nicola...
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Right now, many of Naples ' most important works of art can be found anywhere but Naples. This is thanks to the singular lending policies of the city's two main state museums, the National Museum of Capodimonte and the National Archaeological Museum ...
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To paint one of the most widely represented Gospel episodes in the history of art, the Annunciation, while transforming the scene, so familiar and so traditional, into a narrative capable of also showing the faithful the entire history of salvation. ...
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Yesterday, a few hours after the conclusion of the free Sunday on June 4, for the first time combined with another narrow free admission (the one instituted for Republic Day), Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano triumphantly declared that the Sunday...
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Perhaps, in Fausto Melotti's intentions, an exhibition such as the one the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca is dedicating to him this year should never have been held. The project, curated by Ilaria Bernardi, brings to the halls of the San Micheletto c...
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We have already spoken several times on these pages about the extreme nonchalance with which the two main museums in Naples, the MANN and Capodimonte, lend their family jewels, now in an ever-increasing stream. Regarding the National Archae...
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Seventeenth-century Romans did not hold Urban VIII in high esteem, despite the fact that even today traces of his pontificate can be found scattered all over Rome, and despite the fact that the twenty-one years of his reign, from 1623 to 1644, are pr...
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While in a small town in Brazil they were finishing pulling up a circa 1:3 scale replica of the Trevi Fountain, in Italy the Court of Florence recognized the existence of a "right to the image of cultural heritage" by letting the Galleria dell'Accade...
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In the eyes of Agostino Chigi, Perugino was the "best master in Italy." He wrote this in a letter sent to his father Mariano on November 7, 1500, discussing the possibility of commissioning him to paint an altarpiece for the family altar in the churc...
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A great populist classic of cultural heritage: free museums funded by cuts in military spending. The proposal, which is far from new, was reiterated earlier this week by Tomaso Montanari in an interview with Fortune Italia: "A courageous move would b...
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There has been a lot of talk in recent days about the language barrier that Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano would like to impose for the call for applications for the competition by which as many as thirteen new directors of autonomous museums w...
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Everyone knows For the love of God, the diamond-covered skull that Damien Hirst executed in 2007 garnering worldwide praise and acclaim. How many, however, know the artist who most likely inspired it? One has to look to Piedmont, where Nicola Bolla w...
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As soon as one arrives in the hall of the Veneti at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, after laying eyes on Altobello Melone's Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, one will realize that the caption accompanying the painting tends to emphasize th...
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To think of eighteenth-century art, images of vast heavenly expanses, frivolous worldly amusements, large airy and terse halls, mirrors, gardens, wigs, feathers, and swings immediately come to mind. One tends to think less of an art that depicted the...
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The historic FMR magazine, founded in 1982, returned to publication in December 2021 after a long period of stop. After the first year of the "new" FMR, we spoke with Laura Casalis, editor-in-chief of the magazine and a work and life companion of the...
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The first image that rushes to mind when one thinks of Eleanor of Toledo can only inevitably be Bronzino's sumptuous portrait in which the splendid duchess of Florence, clad in one of the most material and evocative dresses in the history of art, is ...
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San Martino d'Albaro is today a crowded and densely urbanized district of Genoa, now completely incorporated into the city, and whose ancient physiognomy has become almost unrecognizable. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was a country haml...
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It is now pleonastic to discuss the usefulness of yet another Banksy exhibition. Those who would like to go to the Museum of the City of Livorno and spend twelve euros to see an exhibition composed of twenty-six multiples of Banksy, more or less the ...
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The basilica of Santo Stefano Maggiore is mentioned in Milan's guidebooks mainly for having been the church where the young Michelangelo Merisi, destined as an adult to become Caravaggio, was baptized: this was discovered in 2007, when an archival do...
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If one wanted to find some trace, some fragment of the ancient history of Savona's Palazzo del Monte di Pietà ("one of the first in Europe," as tourist guides take pains to point out), one would struggle to notice it on the outside, on the nin...
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If you want to start finding a motif for your own artwork, look at a stain on the wall. This was the suggestion that Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, gave to young artists: the example came to him from a friend of his, a certain Sandro...
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One could start from a first, single noun to introduce the art of Francesca Banchelli (Montevarchi, 1981), one of the most interesting names in young Italian painting: "encounter." It is perhaps the first word that comes up every time you look at her...
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Against the simplifications of a scholastic vulgata that often tends to trivialize the events of the fifteenth century in Ferrara, leading one to consider them almost a sort of vernacular emanation of a broader "Renaissance" centered on Tuscany, one ...
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A catalog of antique goods, dating from before 1920, in the possession of private individuals: this is Vittorio Sgarbi's idea to make the market more agile and free both the state and dealers and collectors from the current notification system. Accor...
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A life spent furnishing the homes of Italians with taste and passion: Count Filippo Perego di Cremnago (Milan, 1930), one of the first and most important interior decorators in our country, has recently set up a foundation that bears his name and aim...
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Achille Bonito Oliva is right when, in his "Lecture" published in Robinson last February 18, he asserts with solid conviction that the work of art does not exist as a monad, but as a portion of a system that is completed by the surplus value guarante...
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It is difficult to avoid the risk of setting up an exhibition that has already been seen when dealing with Vincent van Gogh. That is, one of the artists whose name recurs most often in the exhibition palimpsests of half the world: it will suffice to ...
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Behind the successes of a great artist there is always the work of a large group of people who make them possible. It has always been so in the history of art: in the Renaissance there were workshops, even tiny ones, but they always relied on a preci...
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Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that Giovanni Paolo Panini is rightfully among that select group of artists who can claim to have not one, but two dates of birth. In Panini's case, the first is the date on which he was born in Piacenza, June 17,...
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The eyes of those who arrive in Room 12 of the National Museum of Capodimonte are typically caught by the mysterious and bewitching gaze of Parmigianino'sAntea , or the fixed and penetrating gaze of Galeazzo Sanvitale hanging beside her, another mast...
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The first had been the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, which had sent its jewels to Texas in early 2020: about forty select pieces including Caravaggio's Flagellation, Parmigianino'sAntea, Guido Reni'sAtalanta and Hippomenes, and Titian's Danae, i.e....
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The facade of the church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, so smooth, sober, spartan, rigid in its geometric tripartition, does not say much to the millions of people who wander around Piazza Navona and pass by it without paying too much attention. Ye...
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The Rome of the first half of the 14th century saw the beginning of a "slow and complex revolution," writes Eloisa Dodero in the catalog of the exhibition Recycling Beauty, the show that the Fondazione Prada in Milan, in the spaces of the Podium and ...
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It has generated a predictable controversy the news of the Uffizi ticket increase from 20 to 25 euros in high season, although it will be worth mentioning that the low season rate (12 euros) has not been adjusted and that a ticket for early visitors ...
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It is the dawn of a clear morning in the countryside around Florence, and in the calm that envelops the hills around the city, a painter stops in front of a small lonely stream to stare quickly at the scene he sees before him: a pair of cows, one whi...
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"Here is a book of faith, here is a treatise of love, composed by a candid and most fervent spirit, by an enthusiastic exegete to whom the work of art appears as nothing but religion made sensible under a living form": these are the words with which ...
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A year and a half after the birth of the Uffizi Diffusi project, it is time to take stock: how many more locations will the project have? How will it continue? Next year will also see the first return of a Uffizi work to a local church: to what exten...
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Exactly four hundred years have passed since the publication of Pieter Paul Rubens's Palazzi di Genova, the book with which the great Flemish artist, moved by a keen interest in Genoese architecture, so much so that he gave the volume to the presses ...
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It is not easy to make a nativity scene, wrote Dino Buzzati. It is a "job that may seem like a game and is instead charged with seriousness and mystery," a job not suitable "for mothers," because it "requires skill organizational skills, technica...
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The curious and unusual affair of the altarpiece that Federico Zuccari painted for the Farrattini Chapel in the Cathedral of Amelia in Umbria, an early masterpiece of the painter from the Marche region, is a beautiful story about a separation and a r...
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The ruins of the Bridge of Augustus that appear unexpected and imposing after traveling through hills thick with woods and forests. The ominous gorges of the Nera that evoke mysteries, legends, magical presences. A village with an almost intact medie...
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In front of their eyes the imposing and threatening mass of the Alps, in their hearts the longing for the eternal Urbe, in their minds the images they saw at home while leafing through Piranesi's Views of Rome. We can imagine them this way, the trave...
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Already after the first rooms of the Macchiaioli exhibition in Pisa, the public will be able to breathe a sigh of relief: at last an exhibition on the subject that does not disappoint expectations. And yes, it should perhaps be clear from the title t...
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Renato Roli wrote in his monograph on Donato Creti, published in 1967, that the Emilian painter's Scena d'Arcadia , now housed in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, was worth more than any of his other works to earn him the "flattering appellation ...
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Cultural assets managed by public entities, private entities managing publicly owned cultural assets: the dichotomy between public and private in the management of cultural assets in Italy has given rise to a long-standing debate in which ideological...
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To give an idea of the uniqueness of an exhibition featuring Pisanello as its protagonist, it will suffice to recall that twenty-one years have passed since the last exhibition dedicated to him (at the National Gallery in London, in 2001), and that i...
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Among the frescoes in the Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo, one of four that Raphael frescoed with his collaborators in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace as soon as he arrived in Rome, is one that depicts the coronation of Charlemagne: the iconographic pro...
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Four words, aphoristic, lapidary and forceful, express the credo Leonardo Dudreville would profess from the 1920s onward: "clear ideas, clearly expressed." Clear ideas, vigorously rejecting previous abstract research. Clearly expressed, to welcome th...
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It is among the words of Ólafur Elíasson himself that one needs to find the most interesting elements of his large-scale solo exhibition Nel tuo tempo (In Your Time), the long-awaited event that Palazzo Strozzi is dedicating to the Dani...
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"What is worth more, art or life?" Here, if the two activists who threw tomato sauce at the glass protecting Van Gogh's Sunflowers had studied a little more, they evidently would have been careful not to put the question in such peremptorily Manichea...
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Browsing through the ever-expanding bibliography devoted to Antonio Ligabue, it will not be uncommon to come across comparisons with Vincent van Gogh, a painter with whom Ligabue shared part of the personal story (both experienced loneliness, margina...
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The year that Genoa devoted to Baroque art, fostering several exhibitions of considerable depth in the city and outside (it will be worth mentioning at least the Superbarocco project at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, the exhibition on Domenico P...
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Those who feel like going or returning to see, between now and the end of the month, the large cycle that Anselm Kiefer has executed for the Scrutiny Room of the Ducal Palace, might attempt an exercise: Record the comments of visitors who, ha...
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It was Arturo Dazzi from Carrara who convinced Carlo Carrà to spend the summer of 1926 in Versilia. The two had met at the Venice Biennale that year: contemporaries, artists with an established path, they were going through two profoundly diff...
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Born in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1954, Isao Sugiyama is an artist who has lived and worked in Carrara, Italy, since 1983. His path began with figurative art and then came to Shrines, the series that has characterized his work since 1989 and which Sugiyama...
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Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Aug. 21, 2021. On the shore of a mound formed by the waste materials of a cobalt mine, a child, dressed in a yellow and green soccer shirt and a pair of red shorts, climbs up pushing the dusty tire of a truck...
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CulturalItaly has emerged devastated from two years of pandemic. This is not a statement tinged with sensationalism: there are data certifying all the serious difficulties the sector is going through. Federculture's latest report released worrying d...
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One does not necessarily have to think of childish romanticisms when, in the first room of the Flemish in the Palazzo Bianco in Genoa, one reads the caption accompanying Gerard David's splendid panel on the right wall and notices that someone chose t...
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Guido Strazza (Santa Fiora, 1922) is one of the most significant figures in Italian art in recent decades. Discovered by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, he debuted as a Futurist aeropainter and then became one of the leading Italian exponents of research ...
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It is thanks to a few enlightened minds that we can admire a scant handful of Paul Cézanne's paintings in Italian museums today. Palma Bucarelli who bought Cabanon du Jourdan, believed to be Cézanne's last painting, for the Galleria d'A...
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When one thinks of Federico da Montefeltro, it comes naturally to associate the figure of this condottiere and patron with the great palace that stands out against the skyline of the capital of his duchy, Urbino, the main center of his power, the sea...
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In recent years, the Uffizi has become a major player in the world of museums internationally, thanks in part to frequent, constant, pervasive, effective communication that has used a variety of tools and channels, from traditional media (new...
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The Calafuria watchtower suddenly appears among the rocks as one descends along the Aurelia in that wonderful stretch that, having left Livorno and passed the Antignano coastline, skirts the cliffs just below Montenero and leads toward the village of...
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Culture, it is well known, is not a campaign topic. And if it is not traditionally so in quieter periods than the one we are currently experiencing, let alone how much attention can be devoted to it in a campaign that the parties have had to prepare ...
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The story behind Sodom's Christ at the Column , preserved at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, is curious and singular. It is a detached fresco: in ancient times it stood in the cloister of the convent of San Francesco in Siena, where the artist had...
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Anyone visiting the Doge's Palace in Venice until next Oct. 29 will not find in the Sala dello Scrutinio the works of Tintoretto, Andrea Vicentino, Pietro Liberi, Palma the Younger and the others who painted the splendors of the Serenissima on the la...
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When the wave of demanations that followed the Unification of Italy brought to the museums of Umbria a huge amount of works arriving en masse from the churches and convents of the territory, it is likely that animated discussions immediately arose am...
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A small volume published in 1943 preserves the faded memory of the visit that Anselmo Bucci reserved for the Vittoriale ten years earlier: it was printed by Giorgio Nicodemi, an art historian, a tireless contributor to Emporium, bound to Gabriele d'A...
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Among the factories on the industrious industrial outskirts of Imola, at the edge of an interminable sequence of cultivated fields that accompany the highway towards Forlì and the shores of Romagna, hides the factory that sees the birth of...
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When she first reveals herself to the visitor to Palazzo Barberini, Piero di Cosimo's Magdalene appears as an image so startling, so unexpected, so modern that she does not even look like a work of the 15th century. And she is so real and ali...
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The birth certificate of Renaissance painting is not to be sought, as one might imagine, within the walls of Florence, under Giotto's bell tower, in the shadow of Brunelleschi's dome. As far as we know, Florence was not the first recipient of...
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"An alchemist capable of recreating, within his paintings, an alternative reality." This is how Giacomo Montanari defines one of the greatest champions of the Genoese seventeenth century, that Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known to all as "...
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Those familiar with the administrative machinery that moves most of Italy's civic museums will not have been seized with excesses of astonishment upon reading the news of the alleged abolition of the position of "director of the Trieste Civic...
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Swollen salumeria tits, prominent nipples, skin full of buttery health: these are some of the images that Arbasino, in Fratelli d'Italia, associates with the procubescent, seductive and buxom women who populate in large numbers the painting...
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After exactly one year of work, the National Gallery of Umbria reopens to the public on July 1, 2022 with a totally renovated layout, and many new features some of which are extremely original and innovative (at this link the article with det...
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A great expert on things Emilian of the seventeenth century which was, nomen omen, the great Andrea Emiliani, wrote that one has long misunderstood the so-called "taste of the Bolognese," one has considered it harmony that almost exceeded aca...
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We are in the sanctum sanctorum, I am told as soon as one enters the last room of the Palazzo del Podestà of Caprese, a severe and square stone building over which the shadows of the mountains of the Valtiberina stretch. Here, in this bare...
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He was a painter from Lombardy, Giorgio Belloni: born in Codogno, studied at the Brera Academy following Giuseppe Bertini and admiring Filippo Carcano, an early part of his career spent between Milan and the Veneto. How much further one coul...
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The shadow of an intimate and deep mystery envelops Wainer Vaccari's most recent works. Not that the Modenese artist in the past had accustomed the public to works more agile to probe: Since the beginning of his career, on which has always we...
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The exhibition on Futurist aeropainting that is on view until July 3 at the Labirinto della Masone in Fontanellato has explicit and declared aims of completeness: Dall'alto. Aeropittura futurista (From Above. Futurist Aeropainting), the exhi...
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John XXII was a man who saw the future. And he saw it clear and bright, alive and palpable in the radiance of a universal order reflected in the intentions and actions of the human beings who will inhabit the earth. A future where everywhere...
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Axel Hémery has been the new director of Siena's Pinacoteca Nazionale since March, the first since the Siena museum was granted autonomy. French, born in 1964, an art historian, he was director of the Musée des Augustins in To...
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It could be said that there was not just one Giovan Francesco Caroto: there were as many as the genres with which he tried his hand, the artists he approached, the experiences he gained during his many travels. Artist, in many ways, not so n...
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There was a discussion one day among friends, in front of some works by Tomoko Nagao, a Japanese artist born in Nagoya but who has been living and working in Milan for years, about what had been, for Japanese figurative culture, the most evi...
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Those who habitually frequent Genoa and are familiar with its treasures will certainly feel an unusual sensation as soon as they enter the Scuderie del Quirinale to immerse themselves in the Genoese Superbarocco, as per the title of the exhib...
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It is indeed an exceptional discovery that has been announced by the Caretto & Occhinegro Gallery in Turin: the antiquarians Massimiliano Caretto and Francesco Occhinegro have in fact made public the discovery of the Concerto by Antivedut...
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It is not so much the numbers that give an idea of the phenomenon: it is people's comments that give us the clearest evidence of what Museum Night was. True, there are the "record-breaking" figures, to use an expression dear to those who are...
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It is hard to think that one of the works of art that has become a symbol of the twentieth century in Livorno, Pino Pascali's Great Reptile , spent part of its existence buried in a basement. The City of Livorno had purchased it in 1967, a...
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In the last twenty years alone, nine exhibitions dedicated in various ways to Vasily Kandinsky have been counted in Italy, without mentioning the exhibition occasions built with his multiples, or those where the name of the great abstractioni...
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In the dense group of artists who gave life and form to the Genoese Baroque, one of the most reposed positions today, although it need not have been so in his time, is that occupied by Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, an artist known above all fo...
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Among the more than four hundred works that give body to The Milk of Dreams, the international exhibition of the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, there is one that sums up all its contradictions: one encounters it shortly after the halfway poin...
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"That madman of a Cominetti whom in his youth no sage would have wanted for a friend" That artist "who dispersed in the obscure pages of little newspapers of the time, which no art magazine has handed down." This is how Giovanni Carandente, c...
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A frequent, continuous and melancholy sense of the sublime pervades the pages of Ermanno Rea's Dismissione, the novel that narrates the dismantling of Ilva di Bagnoli from the point of view of the technician in charge of waiting for the succe...
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The best comment is from a user of Florence Mayor Dario Nardella's Facebook page: refrain from any rhetoric about workers' struggles, and simply state the time and place of the exhibition with times, ticket costs and possible reductions. On t...
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To identify the exhibitions curated by Marco Goldin, the art historian-entrepreneur who for years has been grinding out thousands of visitors with his Linea d'Ombra exhibitions, a few years ago a very effective term was coined, "panettone exh...
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There has been a thread linking Livorno to Vittore Grubicy de Dragon for more than a hundred years, and it can perhaps be said that today there is no city that more than the Tuscan port is locked in such a strong relationship with the great point...
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It is quite strange that a Renaissance painter depicts the risen Christ not standing, in a triumphant position, tall and imperious in his divine glory, but seated, in a pose that could be called everyday, almost humble. Yet this is how the V...
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To enter Lucio Fontana's creative process, his thoughts and ideas, to grasp the seductive complexity of his work, the theoretical lucidity that sustains the beauty of his works, the motivations behind the sculptures, the holes, the cuts. To be gu...
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There is an important piece of Cimabuesque culture enclosed within the walls of the Museum of St. Augustine in Genoa. A detached fresco. The inscription at the base bears the name "Magister Manfredinus": it is a singular St. Michael painted in ...
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One could discuss for hours what Francesco Caglioti writes in the introduction to the catalog of his exhibition Donatello. The Renaissance, when he reiterates that art-historical research tends increasingly to move beyond the approach linked ...
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Roberto Longhi had called it "the almost Persian Madonnina who seems to be waiting to give the Child a lesson in the art of perfumes." Vitale degli Equi's Madonna and Child is indeed one of the most delightful objects in the Poldi Pezzoli Mus...
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There is good news and bad news that prepares visitors for their itinerary through the halls of Titian and the Image of Women in Sixteenth-Century Venice, the exhibition that, through works of considerable relevance (not only by Titian: there is ...
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The war in Ukraine at the moment is relatively far from Lviv (Lviv), a city close to the border with Poland, currently a kind of refuge for those leaving the cities most affected by the conflict. Lviv is also home to one of the country's most impor...
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On February 15, 1997, Federico Zeri wrote a letter to the collector who had purchased a splendid Rape of the Sabine Women, assigned to Sebastiano Ricci in an auction at Sotheby's in Munich some time earlier. "The painting examined here," co...
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It is this morning's news that the University of Milano-Bicocca has been caught up in the temptation not to have people talk about Russian culture: the writer Paolo Nori, a great expert on Russian literature, on his Instagram page, in a broke...
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It is a different Siena, that of Domenico Beccafumi. It is not the international and embattled Siena of the fourteenth century, the elegant and flowery Siena of the gilded painters from Guido and Duccio onward, the Siena that achieved that un...
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It will be a Venice Biennale "against the Renaissance," anticipates Chiara Valerio, who will sign one of the essays in the catalog of the international exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani. That is, it will try to propose to the visitor a ...
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Silence is the element that more than any other illuminates the soul of San Michele di Pagana, a village of a few houses guarding a small landing place hidden among the pines and palm trees, along the short road from Rapallo to Santa Margheri...
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At last it seems to be no longer a forbidden topic to talk about the abolition of the Green Pass, and in this sense the latest openings of the members of the Technical-Scientific Committee and even some of the most televised scientists give h...
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1968 was a year of supreme importance for the city of Lucca: the National Museum of Villa Guinigi, acquired by the state twenty years earlier and subjected for two decades to the necessary restoration and arrangement of the collections, opened it...
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In the small and surprising Diocesan Museum of La Spezia, in what was once the nave of the ancient oratory of San Bernardino and is now the central room of the collection, a large glass case holds two fragments of canvas: they are wispy, fade...
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One of the lesser-known merits among the many that can be attributed to Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti is that he was among the first, if not the first, to make use of a historiographical method for a living artist. It happened in the immediate postwar ...
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It had already happened this summer in Rome, when Carlo Calenda wanted to get his hands on the Capitoline Museums, with the idea of dismembering them to make a mega-museum of only Roman antiquities by bringing together the collections of seve...
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The expression "Grand Tour" first appeared in 1670, in the writing of an English Catholic priest, Richard Lassels, who that year published a book in Paris, The Voyage of Italy, in which the cities, monuments, and buildings seen during a trip ...
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Operational since January 2021, one year after its establishment Creation has become one of the most interesting Italian entrepreneurial realities in the field of services for culture and cultural heritage: conceived by a group of partners wi...
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It took Verrocchio several years to reach the degree of technical perfection of the Madonna of Santa Maria Nuova, an exceptional terracotta relief that the public can admire today at the Bargello National Museum. And it took the world four ce...
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Can one speak of a city for sale if, at the end of a light show that uses a monument as a screen for projections, one witnesses for a few seconds the passage of the logo of those who paid for that show? The fact is well known: a lively contro...
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He calls himself "Badiucao," but no one knows his name. He is the Chinese artist who defies censorship by the government of China, which is why he is forced to live in Australia, in exile. Until Feb. 13, 2022, he is the protagonist of the exh...
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To get an idea of how difficult it was in the seventeenth century for a woman to rise to the highest echelons of art, one need only scroll through the Catalogue of the Academicians of San Luca compiled by Giuseppe Ghezzi in the late seventeen...
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Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi: two names that, if placed at the head of the title of any exhibition review, would probably suffice alone to guarantee its success. And so it would seem to be for Caravaggio and Artemisia. The Challenge o...
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Can one add the statue of a woman in Prato della Valle in Padua, the city's marvelous secular pantheon, where, however, the monuments, with the exception of the small bust of Gaspara Stampa flanking Andrea Briosco's statue, celebrate exclusiv...
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With his painting, Claudio Olivieri sought to give form to the invisible. One could summarize in this way, certainly trivializing but giving back a glaring and effective image, much of the research of the great Roman artist by birth, Mantuan by...
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President of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is one of the leading figures in Italian contemporary art: a patron who is very attentive to Italian and international art scenarios, in the foundation...
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Naples, July 29, 1610. Deodato Gentile, bishop of Caserta, writes a letter to Cardinal Scipione Borghese informing him that Michelangelo Merisi, the Caravaggio, has died at Porto Ercole, "where he fell ill and left his life." The "felluca" th...
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Until Jan. 30, 2022, the Pinacoteca Comunale "Claudio Ridolfi" (Municipal Art Gallery) in Corinaldo (Ancona) is hosting the exhibition The Treasure Found. The Tomb of the Prince of Corinaldo, an exhibition that recounts the important archaeologic...
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Mnemosyne was the name of the Greek goddess of memory. Aby Warburg, who pronounced it the Greek way, with the accent on the ipsilon, had it installed, in huge Greek characters, at the entrance to his library in Hamburg. More importantly, he had...
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It is not taken for granted that the public of museums and exhibitions dwells at length on the preparatory studies of a work, on sketches, drawings, models, on everything that the artist elaborated before arriving at the finished product. We ar...
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The deep cultural gloom that has enveloped Carrara for too long is occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning coming from a well-defined source: the 18th-century rooms of Vôtre at the Palazzo del Medico, at the moment the only space ...
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Edition number IX of Flashback, Turin's ancient and contemporary art fair, was held this year from November 4 to 7, in a new venue, the former Dogali Barracks, but as always with a selection of high-quality exhibitors. The numbers exceeded ex...
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For Giovanni Morelli, Ludovico Mazzolino was "der Glühwurm unter den Malern," as he called him in his Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei: the "firefly of painters." The reason why is quickly said: because of his "wonde...
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Four years into his tenure as director of the Complesso della Pilotta in Parma, Simone Verde takes stock of the main activities of the past few months, which are leading toward the end of construction and into a new phase for the museum: that...
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From the Facebook group Le Connoisseur, always diligent and a source of interesting ideas, comes, on the part of administrator Lorenzo Barbato, a report of a piece of news that has not been talked about in Italy and that has instead obtained ...
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In a beautiful mural that occupies one wall of the refectory of what was once the convent of the Camaldolese monks of Ravenna, now home to the Classense Library, is painted the Gospel episode of the Marriage at Cana, the work of the Ravenna-b...
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In one of his most recent books, L'hiver de la culture, Jean Clair recalled a visit to the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in Paris, in the company of a young Canadian art historian, a museum curator, who was crossing the Atlantic fo...
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As we wait to see what the Tridentine Diocesan Museum will look like under the new director, economist Michele Andreaus, it is interesting to turn the lights back on the path the Trent institution has taken in recent years, for several reason...
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It is difficult, with the Renaissance splendors that invade the collective imagination whenever one thinks of the arts in Mantua, to imagine that the city had a fruitful artistic life even before the arrival of the various Mantegna, Leon Bat...
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Lunigiana, as is well known, is a land dotted with Dante's traces, albeit fragmentary and with few certain data. We do know for sure that Dante, on the morning of October 6, 1306, was in Sarzana, in Piazza della Calcandola, today's Piazza de...
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What will exhibitions look like in the future? Big blockbuster exhibitions again? Small thematic insights? How much will immersiveness count? Will exhibitions know how to integrate digital, respect multiple points of view, take into account the n...
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A portrait filled with "sensitivity, kindness, love, and a demeanor that breathes the spirit of the Vita Nova." These are the words that Mary Shelley, in 1844, used to comment on the fresco with the portrait of Dante Alighieri that had recent...
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Tiarno di Sotto is a quiet hamlet of just a few houses nestled among the meadows of the Ledro valley, in that part of Trentino where the inhabitants' speech has the narrow, closed, sharp sounds of the dialects of the Lombard valleys. Together...
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With Art Week in Milan, we can officially say that the contemporary art world is back in full swing, live. Among theartists in pole position is Michele Chiossi (Lucca, 1970), one of the most well-known and interesting names in contemporary marb...
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After years of waiting, Carrara finally welcomes the first monographic exhibition on Giovanni Antonio Cybei (Carrara, 1706 - 1784), one of the greatest artists the city has produced, and who had never before been able to boast of an exhibition ...
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The story of Fede Galizia, wrote Flavio Caroli in the most important monograph dedicated to the Lombard painter of Trentino origins, possesses "a wholly singular importance, which it would be improper not to define as avant-garde throughout...
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With the return of art fairs in attendance, we are back to discussing the market landscape and the Italian scene. Among the protagonists of recent times is certainly Milan's Dep Art Gallery, among the most active even during the pandemic and ready ...
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Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio is one of the most active galleries in recent months: bucking the market trends, it has recently moved its headquarters to Todi, has just returned from Miart (the first fair in attendance in Europe since the beginn...
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It is difficult to say which seventeenth-century painter was best able to translate into images the verses of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata . If, however, one were to point to the artist who most passionately approached Tasso's univer...
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The circumstances of the "discovery" of the Miracle of St. Diego, a painting that ranks among the most unusual and valuable that Bernardo Strozzi's inspiration ever produced, are at least fortuitous. It was the art historian Gustavo Frizzoni ...
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Curzio Malaparte, in his Maledetti toscani, said that the libeccio is not a home wind. It is the humid, hot wind that comes from the southwest: it blows especially in summer, rises suddenly, lashing the coast with violent gusts that cut the...
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Exclusive interview by Windows on Art. Last August 15, after 20 years, Afghanistan returned under the control of the Taliban, who entered Kabul that very day. The world now fears that there could be a repeat of the scenes of destruction and looti...
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Transforming the Capitoline Museums into a large museum of the history of Rome that would bring together the collections of the various institutes that today preserve Roman antiquities in the capital (National Roman Museum, Museum of Romana, Ce...
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A life between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, a gallery that has been a landmark in world art for decades, a collector who has collected art from every era, from archaeological finds to gold backgrounds, from great seventeenth-century p...
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There are two hagiographies of St. Frances Romana that narrate a precise episode, which occurred on September 6, 1431, when the Roman mystic, born Francesca Bussa de' Leoni, was sixty-seven years old: while listening to Mass in the church of Sa...
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Two and a half meters of panel filled and overflowing with gold, refined colors, and skillfully calculated harmonies. Ludovico Brea'sAscension will bring to the mind of some the balanced balances of a Piero della Francesca, to the memories of...
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"The constraints of confinement have led each of us to question our lifestyles, our true needs, our aspirations, repressed in those who suffer a closed condition between home and work, forgotten in those who enjoy a less enslaved life, and masked g...
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There are paintings to be heard as well as seen: paintings that have such evocative power that they lead us to imagine the voices and noises of what the painter has decided to show us on canvas. The synaesthetic power of Moses Levy's painting...
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The opportunity was one that rarely happens: the most important work in private hands by one of the greatest artists in Italian art history put on the market at a more than affordable price. Last July 8, at Christie's Old Masters Evening Sale, Pa...
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What place does Beato Angelico occupy in the development of Italian art? Pavel Pavlovič Muratov asked that question in 1929. And it is a question to which many scholars, more or less explicitly, have attempted to give an answer, tr...
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In that thin strip of plain on the border between Tuscany and Liguria, squeezed between the hills on one side and the sea on the other, the traveler driving along the Aurelia moving toward Sarzana will notice at a certain point, among the bus...
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By a fortuitous coincidence, the rich exhibition Le Signore dell'arte, the show with which Palazzo Reale in Milan composes a fragrant anthology of women's painting between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falls exactly fifty years after the p...
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One cannot say one has known Umbria without having seen Umbrian painting. And similarly, it is difficult to approach Umbrian painting without ever having been to the region: there are perhaps few areas in Italy where the relationship between ...
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"Placemakers in a modern, social version" at the museum. So read the press release of the National Archaeological Museum of Taranto (MArTA), later retracted, presenting to the public the Bellezze al museo initiative, a tour by the entrepreneu...
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In the 1894 guide to the Esposizioni Riunite in Milan, it could be read that Ettore Tito's paintings were not capable of drawing the public's attention d' embl&e acute;e: "they are not large in size, nor are they of new or eccentric subject m...
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There is a rather precise moment in the course of history when it is possible to identify the prodromes of the construction of today's Dante myth. The Dante cult, in other words, has a place and a date of birth, namely late 18th-century Engla...
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We know very little about Girolamo Mirola, and one of the few certainties about him is his very close proximity to that great painter who was a kind of his alter ego, the Parma-born Jacopo Zanguidi, known as Bertoja: in recent art historiogra...
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Per the Treccani dictionary, the adjective "clumsy" means "anything that shows clumsiness, timidity, lack of ease," or can refer to anything that is "lacking in grace, elegance, harmony, such that it is almost ridiculous." Clumsy is, in essen...
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We know a good part of the biographical story of Guido Cagnacci, the great Romagna artist, thanks to a nucleus of letters and documents collected in the mid-18th century by a Rimini painter, Giovanni Battista Costa, who called Cagnacci an "excellen...
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It is well known that the policies of decorum so dear to bourgeois respectability have produced, over the years, ircocervi that should be monstrous to anyone who does not yet want to surrender to the idea that our cities should be the mirror of the...
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It is curious to know that today we refer to Silvestro Lega's best-known masterpiece with a title that its author never heard of in his entire life. And it is even surprising to realize that we know nothing about the first fifty years of this...
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If one were to take a few minutes in a museum or church to observe the typical behavior of the public in front of a polyptych, one would find that there is a large number of visitors who pay little attention to the predella, observe it with a...
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Rolli Days in Genoa, the event that twice a year (in spring and fall) opens for two days to the public the doors of the main historical palaces of Genoa, a UNESCO World Heritage Unesco World Heritage Site (with special events, extraordinary...
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Giovanni Testori was right: it is impossible to forget the faces of Tanzio da Varallo's two Davids . Especially of the less ancient one, the very blond teenager that Tanzio painted around 1625, of the two the one with the more ephebic face: "...
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An exhibition that sets out to reknit the threads between Dante Alighieri and Florence, reconstructing the process of reappropriation to which the poet was subjected in the years following his death, and following the dissemination of his wri...
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There is one element of Lucio Fontana that can put everyone in agreement, one element of his art that perhaps even his increasingly scattered detractors might be ready to acknowledge: the great theoretical lucidity that has always motivated every s...
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Koen Vanmechelen (Sint-Truiden, 1965), one of the leading contemporary Belgian artists with several major exhibitions around the world to his credit, has been pursuing the unique project The Cosmopolitan Chicken Projectsince 1999 : it is a proj...
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Museums continue to be one of the places where there is the least risk of Covid-19 infection: we have been saying this on these pages since April of last year, and the fact that no museum has so far proved to be a place where the infection ha...
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Within the scientifically and rationally defined space of Renaissance perspective throbs the restless soul of man with all its contradictions, weaknesses, and opposites. The reading that Massimo Cacciari offers of fifteenth-century Humanism i...
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In Gianfranco Ferroni's art, there is a before and there is an after. And the watershed is the 1968 Venice Biennale. It is June 18, the day when the preview of the great international exhibition opens: in St. Mark's Square, which is not yet a...
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Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1921, the physiologist Mariano Luigi Patrizi published a booklet that attempted a psychological reconstruction of Caravaggio's personality from his works: it was entitled Un pittore criminale (A Criminal Painte...
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How has Covid's pandemic year been for a small- to medium-sized gallery? What were the innovations? How has online helped? We asked the historic Cardelli & Fontana Gallery in Sarzana, in business since 1980. Here are the answers from the ...
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A little more than six and a half billion euros is a figure of substantial proportions for the culture sector: the 6.675 billion that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRP) will make available to culture corresponds to a little more ...
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"In ancient times religions and philosophies did not live except by silence: they knew and observed the necessity of silence. Those that shunned that necessity, those were always misunderstood deformed profaned disheartened." In his Secret Bo...
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Even among those involved in culture there is perceived, in these hours, a strong hostility to the April 26 reopenings, seen from many quarters as a cession of the government to the "aperturist right" (I quote Tomaso Montanari). I believe tha...
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The Albertina in Vienna preserves a drawing, widely attributed to Michelangelo, with some studies of intertwined hands: in the exact center of the sheet, well detached from everything else, stands a male torso, with arms folded and hands join...
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In recent days, several scholars have been very vocal about the possible Caravaggesque autography of an Ecce Homo that was about to go to auction in Madrid at the Ansorena house. However, there are also those who maintain a much more cautious...
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Bava Beccaris' savage cannons had raged with senseless brutality on the workers who had taken to the streets of Milan to demonstrate and protest against the rising price of bread. The general's bloody artillery had left dozens dead and hundre...
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It is one of the most important discoveries of recent times: theEcce Homo that was about to go to auction in Madrid at Ansorena (story here) and was blocked before the sale because it was recognized by several scholars as a possible autograph b...
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There are actually two resurrections to be admired in the superb masterpiece that Santi di Tito painted for the Medici altar in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, the place where the panel is still preserved today. The first is the subj...
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Literary critics have never been particularly tender with Storia dell'arte italiana in poesia, the anthology that, in 1990, Plinio Perilli assembled in an attempt to compile a history of art in verse, either with poems taken from already publ...
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Giulio Paolini (Genoa, 1940) is the protagonist of a new exhibition at the Alfonso Artiaco Gallery in Naples: titled Fuori quadro, the show exhibits eight works, four of which were made for the occasion, along with several previously unpublis...
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The image of spring, in Benedetto Antelami's sculpture, takes the form of an elegant, somewhat haughty young woman, dressed in a long tunic cinched at the waist by a leather girdle, and on her shoulders a cloak that defends her from the last ...
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"L'histoire de l'art depuis cent ans est l'histoire de ce qui est photographiable," the history of art of the last hundred years is the history of what is photographable. André Malraux said this in his 1947 Le Musée imaginaire, and his ...
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The recently concluded five-hundredth anniversary of Raphael has not been short of opportunities to bring to the public's attention even the critical fortune that the Urbino, for centuries, has known almost interrupted, and in this sense ...
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There are precise reasons why there are only three works by Vincent van Gogh in Italian public collections: the Gardener and theArlesian in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and the Breton Women in the Galleria ...
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Luigi Lanzi wrote, in his Storia pittorica d'Italia (Pictorial History of Italy), that Genovesino succeeded in all themes, but especially in the "most horrific" ones. It is difficult to blame the abbot when one admires certain vanitas by the Liguri...
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In 1919, a 31-year-old Giorgio De Chirico published in Valori Plastici a ferocious account of his visit to what is now the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. For the young painter, it was probably a distressing and masochistic e...
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I cannot recall a more controversial appointment of director of a cultural site than the one that invested Gabriel Zuchtriegel with the role of director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. I remember, of course, equally heated debates when the...
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It was a midwinter day in 1879 when Charles Fairfax Murray entered the church of San Francesco in Siena with the specific intention of going to see a work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti that was kept there, in the chapel of the Archbishop's Seminary....
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Don't be fooled by the title. There is little that is lighthearted or delightful about that Trattenimento in un giardino di Albaro that stands out in Room 23 of Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, Ga: even a painting that seemingly guides us among the am...
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To fully understand the revolutionary scope of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Umberto Boccioni's masterpiece, one might start with Lucio Fontana and his Technical Manifesto of Spatialism: "Futurism adopts movement as its principle and only ...
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Edith Gabrielli has been the first director since September of the new autonomous museum in Rome that unites the Vittoriano and Palazzo Venezia. These are two institutes Gabrielli knows very well, since they were part of the Polo Museale ...
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Stefano L'Occaso has been the new director of the Ducal Palace in Mantua since November, having won the international competition that named him as Peter Assmann's successor. L'Occaso, a Roman but Mantuan by adoption (he has in fact been in...
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Guido Piovene, perhaps the greatest of Italian travel writers, described the Madonna of Peace as "the best picture painted by Pinturicchio." The choice is a tough one: Bernardino di Betto was a sublime artist; it is difficult to say which of the ...
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The 1980 Venice Biennial catalog inserts Cioni Carpi (Eugenio Carpi de' Resmini; Milan, 1923 - 2011) in a group of artists who "have worked since the late 1960s with insistence on the media of large-scale communication, experimenting with a d...
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Art historian Francesca Cappelletti was appointed in September as the new director of the Borghese Gallery, and took office in her role a few weeks ago. Cappelletti was already a member of the Gallery's scientific committee and has a long exp...
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Contrary to what one might at first think, there is no elaborate philosophical framework underlying Pessimism and Optimism, the masterpiece to which Giacomo Balla devoted at least five years of research. There is, however, a firm intention: t...
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Je est un autre. "I am another": this was what a 16-year-old Rimbaud wrote in the intense days of the Paris Commune, in two letters sent one to Izimbard and one to Demeny, to assert the need for a poetry that would free itself from the excesses o...
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"Hilly country with a sunken sky" is the phrase that concludes the laconic card reserved for Andrea Previtali's Crucifixion in the catalog of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice compiled by Luigi Serra in 1914. The landscape, in that card, ...
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Pietro Bernardi is an elusive artist. We know little more than nothing about him: "always mysterious and poorly documented," art historian Sergio Marinelli called him in a 2016 essay. He was active in Verona for a few years at the turn of the...
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According to a widespread and ingrained prejudice, museums are primarily machines for tourists. And it is probably on the basis of this prejudice that management and governance models have been imagined in the past that have tied economic flows t...
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A hymn to light: one could define Gaetano Previati's Dance of the Hours in this way, taking up a happy image by Domenico Tumiati. One of his most poetic, most mysterious, most elevated, most luminous, most triumphant masterpieces: the twelve Hours of...
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On the road that leads to Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour is a great Genoese, Luca Cambiaso: it is his the refined Madonna of the Candle that one encounters in Room 2 of Palazzo Bianco in Genoa. It is probably the Moneglia-born painter's mo...
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There is a train stopped at a subway station, we see it from the front. We can make out a figure inside the convoy, perhaps that of the driver. The crush typical of the days leading up to Christmas swarms the platform. Above the locomotive we...
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To begin to reread Alberto Angela 's unprecedented program on Caravaggio, Tonight with Caravaggio, one could start from the mere numerical data, which speak, as usual, of a great triumph: on Wednesday, December 16, his program was the most watched ...
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It is difficult to find an art history textbook that does not reproduce the Sant'Anna Metterza, the Uffizi panel painting created, around 1424, by Masaccio together with Masolino da Panicale. And rare, too, are the works that can rival the ...
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What has happened to culture at this stage of the Covid pandemic? It was not mentioned in the council president's last press conference, it does not even receive simple words of comfort from Culture Minister Dario Franceschini, it was clubbed in the...
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Elisabetta Sirani, a precious pearl of seventeenth-century painting, had the eccentric and refined habit of affixing her signature to the most unusual and unthinkable details of her graceful paintings: a row of buttons, the cuff of a shirt, the back ...
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An AgCom report on the journalistic profession during the Covid emergency, released last week, clearly indicates that culture holds a singular record in theinformation sphere: it was the topic that, more than any other, journalists had to leave u...
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The artistic duo Bertozzi & Casoni, composed of Giampaolo Bertozzi (Borgo Tossignano, 1957) and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni (Lugo, 1961), is one of the most important names in international contemporary ceramics. A fundamental characteristic of th...
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"The illustrative symbol of man in his family and social organization is the flock," Folco Portinari wrote. "The flock is the people, whether one wishes to give it a negative or a positive sign." One can start from here to read one of Giuseppe Pelliz...
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Not infrequently, the press has given ample space to sensational hoaxes in the field of art history, often conferring media legitimacy on arrembant wafflers, self-styled experts completely unknown to the scientific community, and characters in sear...
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In fishing jargon, they are called "scales" those large square nets that are attached to long poles equipped with pulleys, and then lowered into a river or the sea: one waits a few moments, and then pulls them up, trying to be fast in the hope th...
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Where are we with the digitization of museums and cultural heritage? The closures that have affected cultural venues from March to the present have forced a rapid acceleration of ongoing processes, and new projects are in the pipeline to make our...
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The frescoes around which the entire story of the novel that won Marco Santagata the Campiello Prize in 2003, Il maestro dei santi pallidi, really exist. They decorate two small mountain churches in the Apennines of Modena: the figures in the ora...
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If we were to identify, in Cosmè Tura's entire production, a single detail that could serve as a summary of his expressionist painting ante litteram, nervous, sculptural, so crazy and disturbing, so far from the orderly and seraphic Renais...
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The total shutdown of culture (exhibitions and museums, but also archives and libraries) imposed by the government with the dpcm of November 3 and the substantial resignation with which those working in the field, with few exceptions, have greete...
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Few times of the year are as melancholy as the last week of October, when daylight saving time ends and darkness suddenly falls, voracious, like a quick and heavy curtain, almost suddenly extinguishing the red lights of the sunsets (the most be...
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At the moment the news is not yet official, but the rumors are chasing each other with more and more pungent insistence: Rai might close Rai Storia for reasons of so-called spending review, which is necessary to allow public television to overcom...
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Perfume is an enveloping, intoxicating, fragrant, full, hypnotic work. A disruptive cascade of adjectives could go on to overwhelm Luigi Russolo's masterpiece, a painting that can be seen and smelled, heard and admired, which aims to evoke in ...
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There is a precise reason, theological and political, for the frequent presence of works featuring Tobias and his angel in almost all Italian collections that include a substantial number of seventeenth-century objects. The fact is that the most ...
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From an article published this morning in the Manifesto, we learn that among the measures under consideration by the government to contain the wave of Covid-19 contagion would include a curfew from 9 or 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., which would therefore e...
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Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt did well to emphasize last week, in responding to a question at a press conference, that in the future there will be no room for projects that can be labeled "Uffizi 2," but there will, if anything, be several places ...
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Those who try to find, in Giacomo Leopardi's writings, a glimmer of interest in Lorenzo Lotto will be disappointed. Yet it will be said that the coincidences are many. Starting with the presence of the Venetian artist in the "native wild village,...
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Anyone looking at his works will immediately be led to think of a kind of Italian Gustav Klimt. A Venetian intoxicated by the fragrances of the Viennese secession. A young man from Murano, the son of a glassmaker, and therefore trained in the g...
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In a passage from his Lives, and specifically in the one dedicated to Titian, Giorgio Vasari lists some works admired in the wardrobe of Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere, at the time the great historiographer visited Urbino, in 1548: among these w...
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Meanwhile, the data: today, September 23, 2020, those who try to Google "Chiara Ferragni" and "Uffizi" will get more than a hundred thousand results. On the other hand, those who search for information on "Dolce and Gabbana" (or "Dolce & Gabban...
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It bears the date of October 17, 1786, Johann Wolfang Goethe's visit to Cento, appropriately and extensively noted in his Italienische Reise. The great man of letters, having arrived in this industrious strip of the Po Valley on a mild autumn eve...
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How is the recovery of the art gallery sector going? Has digital been a successful challenge or is there still something to fix? How are galleries preparing for the reopening of events and fairs? What are the differences between Italy and abroad? W...
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A nymph strides through the thicket of the forest, and with her hands gently wreathes her tawny head. The sunset light blazes and floods the dense, parched forest with vermilion red: in the center, the thick, haughty trunk of a holm oak. Below, a...
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The last image of Franco Maria Ricci was that of a distinguished octogenarian who, having returned to dwell in the countryside of Fontanellato, had discarded the suits he had worn all his life and opted for a green loden jacket, worn over a pair ...
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Almost two weeks of closure to allow a private individual to organize his own party in a public space: this is what happens, amid general silence, in Florence, where Palazzo Vecchio keeps its doors closed for no less than thirteen consecutive day...
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The first impact with Philippe Daverio and his Passepartout was not, usually, of the happiest: indeed, for many his figure was even repelling. There is no denying that his presence embodied the classic clichés of the art historian fixed in the...
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In the last five minutes of lightning-fast and thunderous media celebrity to which the debate on monuments has risen (the karst flow of which has alternated between sudden emergencies, provoked by events of close relevance, and more more or less ...
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There are three reasons that usually prompt visitors to cross the threshold of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice: Giovanni Bellini's Presentation in the Temple , the magnificence of the salons, and Carlo Scarpa 's spaces on the first floor. ...
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A direct response from the MiBACT press office to grievances emanating from the grassroots is a decidedly rare occurrence: nevertheless, the problem with the two communiqués issued yesterday afternoon, through which the ministry sought to take...
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Rossella Biscotti (Molfetta, 1978) is among the most interesting contemporary European artists. With her work, Rossella Biscotti investigates archival objects and materials to bring out their history (even the most uncomfortable, or the forgotten...
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I think common to many people is the sense of satisfaction felt last week on receiving the news of the allocation of twelve million euros, by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, to complete the long-standing affair of Isozaki's Loggia, the great w...
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Florence 's municipal administration probably has a soft spot for "VIP" dinners in public spaces. And although it might have been assumed that, after the heated controversy that accompanied the Ferraristi banquets on the Ponte Vecchio in 2013 and Mor...
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It is well known that instrumentalizations exploit very blurred boundaries: sometimes, those that simply run between two articulated prepositions. So it happens that, in Rome, three city councilors of the Pentastellata majority (Gemma Guerrini, Mas...
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Can the Uffizi Galleries, the largest and most visited museum center in our country, and where the best of Italian (and other) art of all time is preserved, indulge in moments of excessive ... relaxation aboutcontemporary art? Doubts come quickly...
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His real name is Cristian Bugatti, he was born in Rho in 1973 grew up in Cerano, and his stage name is Bugo: everyone knows him as an important singer-songwriter and musician (many consider him the father of Italianindie ), but not everyone knows t...
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If it is true, as many are at pains to repeat, that every crisis is an opportunity, this time the cultural sector can be glad to have received a golden one: the Recovery Fund is not only a historic achievement, the first fund in history that the ...
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Since 2016 in Florence, the Black History Month Florence project has aimed to explore African and Afro-descendant cultures in the Italian context. The research of this project has resonated widely in these weeks of protest by the Black Lives Matter...
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"When a beautiful white girl runs into the arms of a black man, it means something is wrong. It is unequivocal proof." So begins Love is the message, the message is death, Arthur Jafa's masterpiece that a number of museums around the world (includi...
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When one admires a sculpture by Quinto Martini, at times, at a first careless glance, one might be overwhelmed by the temptation to consider his art as a sort of coda of nineteenth-century verism, an art strongly anchored to the naturalistic datu...
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"Territorial pissings" is not only the title of a famous song by Nirvana, but is also the expression with which Labranca identified pseudo-intellectuals who self-validate their positioning within a social area by marking its territory, that is, b...
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As Italy prepares to emerge from the coronavirus emergency and discuss revitalization proposals, a bill is being debated in Trentino that will be voted on tomorrow and risks setting a dangerous precedent: it is the Fugatti-Spinelli ddl, which gu...
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Milan had to content itself with being irradiated by a lightning-fast reverberation of the dispute that pitted the two great rivals of neoclassical sculpture, Antonio Canova (Possagno, 1757 - Venice, 1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (Copenhagen, 1770...
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I feel deep embarrassment when I read certain hasty and superficial judgments about the wave of protests of the Black Lives Matter movement that has swept through Anglo-Saxon countries and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Western world. I find ...
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There is no virus for Donatello's putti wiggling on the pulpit panels of Prato Cathedral: their festive dance has been going on for nearly six hundred years, heedless of any traversal, ready to mock wars and epidemics to the sound of trumpets and t...
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I believe that I am a person above parties and above suspicion when it comes to the movement of works of art : what speaks is the history of our magazine, it is the many battles we have always engaged in and supported to avoid unnecessary transf...
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"We need to focus on the brand ofItaly in the world, to promote the incomparable artistic and natural heritage we possess. Because in all these months, we have to say it strongly, the beauty ofItaly has never gone into quarantine": these are some...
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One might feel a sort of unpleasant embarrassment knowing that it took almost four hundred years for the Church to erase a cult that, over the centuries, has fed anti-Semitic prejudice, with the aggravating circumstance of having exploited the b...
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For more than a month, we have been trying to obtain an interview with the minister of cultural heritage, Dario Franceschini, on the topic of culture during and after the health emergency. We submitted the request on April 14 and received sev...
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How are operations progressing in preparation for the reopening at the Bargello Museums? We caught up with the director, Paola D'Agostino, who told us what has been done during the period of closure due to the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus p...
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"Great street artists have their own style and personality." Interview with Blek Le RatStreet artist Blek Le Rat (Xavier Prou; Paris, 1951) is one of the pioneers of international street art and the father and initiator of stencil graffiti, the same...
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In an op-ed we hosted in the December issue of our print magazine, art historian Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, and former director of CIMAM-the International Committee of Museums of Mode...
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Circulate masterpieces from "major museums" by lending them to "smaller museums" and launch "quality contemporary art" initiatives in smaller, decentralized venues. This is what Pierluigi Panza proposed last May 1 in the columns of the Florentine...
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Among the books I try to keep on hand at all times is a cornerstone of the bibliography on exhibition events, Francis Haskell's The Birth of Exhibitions: In tracing the history of art exhibitions, the English art historian believed that the exhibitio...
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Dear Reader,
the challenges that the future of publishing poses to us are arduous, long and demanding: this is especially so in a small sector such as ours, that of art publishing, which relies on the passion of so many readers who make up...
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Two thoughts for a different April 25 than usual, for a Liberation Day that, for the first time in history and for a sort of mocking irony of fate, sees us all segregated at home by the imposition of a series of decrees that we are all abiding by...
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In these days of enforced closure, the Diocesan Museum of Milan (which was attended by35,000 visitorsin 2019 ) has created an unprecedented and original online guided tour model, replicating on the web the experience that the institute has been succ...
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How does the Accademia Gallery in Florence, one of the most visited museums in Italy and among the top 40 in the world, plan to respond to the challenge posed by the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic? With Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Florenti...
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When one admires a painting whose protagonists are elderly people segregated in a hospice, what one is contemplating is "not a normal aspect of our culture, so to speak," wrote art historian Michael F. Zimmermann a few years ago, speaking of the ...
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In order to deal in the most rational and shrewd way with the issue of reopening bookstores, it is possible, in the meantime, to remorselessly shred all the rhetoric made up of melancholy along the lines of "the bread of the soul book" and so on ...
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The health emergency due to the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic has called into question many aspects of our lives that we took for granted, and will force us to rethink them. It is not only about how we live our daily cultural experi...
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More than 3 million visitors, more than 14 million in revenue devoted to conservation and promotion: these are two numbers for the monuments in Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli, managed by the Opera della Primaziale Pisana. Four monuments (the Cathedra...
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A couple of examples. The first is from last March 29, on the program Che tempo che fa: according to virologist Roberto Burioni, on the day when the health emergency ends and we can finally go outside, "we will all have to wear a mask every four ...
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How is Italy's most visited museum, namely the Uffizi Gallery (along with the museums in its cluster), coping with the health emergency over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic? What will museums have to do when there is a restart? ...
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The issue of public debt, it is known, has always stimulated the most fervid creativity, especially in times of crisis, when any solution to reduce the burden on Italians is thrown around with the most nonchalant nonchalance, a bit like when, a...
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It is above all to the art historian Andrea Emiliani (Predappio, 1931 - Bologna, 2019) that we owe the rediscovery of a genius of seventeenth-century Ferrarese art, Carlo Bononi (Ferrara, c. 1580 - 1632), whom in 1962, Giacomo Bargellesi lamented...
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Aut tace, aut loquere meliora silentio. "Either keep silent, or say something that is better than silence." The sculptural evidence of those six words engraved on the panel that Salvator Rosa carelessly holds up in his Self-Portrait at the National G...
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The narrative of the ongoing health emergency has developed, with continuous and constant vehemence, mainly around the work of those who have been identified as the "front lines" of the war on the coronavirus, namely the doctors, nurses and, in g...
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Fifteen years have passed since Chicago Tribune art critic Lori Waxman began touring museums, galleries and various exhibition venues with her now-famous performance, 60 wrd/min art critic, whose mechanism is very simple: in the space chosen to hos...
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A museum that has changed its face: this could be said of the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia, which since 2015, that is, since it became an autonomous museum following the Franceschini reform, under the direction of art historian Marco Pie...
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For a long time we have been repeating on these pages that the mere visitor count should not be the yardstick by which to measure the success of an exhibition. Similarly, we have always refrained from evaluating the success of an exhibition on the ba...
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While in these hours there is an argument over the loan of a work by Raphael, the Portrait of Leo X, which will temporarily leave the Uffizi to reach Rome, where it will be exhibited at the maximostra on the Urbinate for the 500th anniversary of...
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An exhibition on Banksy has been circulating for some time now that invites visitors to decide whether the anonymous Bristol street artist is a genius or a vandal: that, at least, is the question the title of the exhibition poses to its audience....
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It is pleasing to note that a good number of Italian newspapers have rediscovered their passion forteaching art history and spent the weekend just past delighting our intellects with refined analyses of the decisions ofYale University, which, kee...
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It is a little more disconcerting than usual this year to read the statement on museum visitor data that the Ministry of Culture annually releases at the end of January to present the previous year's results. And the disquiet, of course, does not...
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"Prayers of stone." this is how, with this image of icastic immediacy, scholar Caterina Rapetti had renamed the majesties of Lunigiana in a study published in 1992, after a decade of reconnaissance in the area, aimed at surveying the Lunigiana portio...
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Sixty thousand visitors in two months of opening: such is the proportion of the flow that has so far affected the exhibition Modigliani and the Montparnasse Adventure, which the city of Livorno has set up in the halls of the Museo della Città ...
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At the end of November, CIMAM (the International Committee for Museums of Modern Art), the leading international body of modern and contemporary art museums around the world, affiliated with ICOM, appointed its new president: Japan's Mami Katao...
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Few artists can boast of calling themselves truly magical, and Dosso Dossi is among those who belong to this rare genius. Perhaps it is because Dosso is in danger of entrancing us that Berenson suggested, in his seminal North Italian Painters of ...
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Perhaps for some people the data on the employment rates of our graduates are not shocking enough: otherwise, it would not explain why this is a topic that interests the public very little and emerges very infrequently in political debate. So, if col...
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Fifty-one works from the sites of the 2016 central Italian earthquake will soon return to the cities and towns of the crater, from which they came: first, however, they will be displayed in a three-stage exhibition, entitled Renaissance in the Ma...
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It was the French artist Philippe Burty (Paris, 1830 - 1890) who was the first to coin, in 1872, a term later destined to identify that mania for Japan which, for at least two decades to that part, had taken possession of many painters, sculpto...
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The erudite Gaetano Atti narrates, in his Sunto storico della città di Cento (Historical summary of the city of Cento), that on July 6, 1796, two Napoleonic commissioners, named Ciney and Berthollet (to be identified, in all likelihood, with t...
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If today we admire fundamental masterpieces of the Futurists in museums halfway around the world, we owe that possibility to the substantial disinterest (if not toostracism tout court) that the cultural milieu of postwar Italy reserved for Bocc...
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In January 2018, the Metropolitan Museum in New York surprised the world by sanctioning the end of its decades-long admission policy, which provided free admission for all upon a free bid, and introducing a $25 admission fee for all visitors ...
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As is well known to all those who have approached the figure of Raphael Sanzio (Urbino, 1483 - Rome, 1520), tradition usually divides his brief, dazzling, dense and unrepeatable career into three distinct portions: an early youthful phase, whic...
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It may seem strange to say, but Maurizio Cattelan 's banana has an illustrious precedent when it comes to food elevated to the status of a work of art. And certainly we are not talking about seventeenth-century still lifes filled with fruits of eve...
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More than 270,000 visitors were counted when the doors of the major exhibition on Giulio Romano (Giulio Pippi de' Iannuzzi; Rome, c. 1499 - Mantua, 1546), which had begun just two months earlier, on September 1, 1989, closed at Palazzo Te in Mant...
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"Petrarchism is a chronic disease of Italian literature," wrote Arturo Graf at the beginning of one of his memorable essays in 1888: and the sixteenth century is "the century in which Petrarchism floats, luxuriates, triumphs and overflows." It is d...
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The drama of the high water that hit Venice on the night of November 12-13, with the second highest tide ever (or at least since scientific records exist), is also likely to be remembered for the load of social hatred that, for some reason, it ma...
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In the long list of editorials that all the newspapers have dedicated in these hours to the drama of Venice, no mention has been made of a fact that dates back to the beginning of this year: on January 31, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, with a ...
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Flashback, the ancient and contemporary art fair held every year in Turin, for this 2019 comes to its seventh edition: as per its characteristic, this year there is a central theme (the Wanderers), and as every year the quality is very high. Wait...
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The multifarious conglomeration of articles, short articles, editorials, reviews, elzeviri, and rinses of communiqués that have been accompanying the Italian Pavilion 's exhibition(Neither Other Nor This. The Challenge to the Labyrinth) at the...
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Among the episodes of Caravaggio 's biography that are less frequented by scholars is perhaps the stay that the great Lombard painter made in the Marche region between October 1603 and April 1604: the product of those few months' stay in the regi...
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The 26th edition of Artissima, the major contemporary art exhibition-market to be held in Turin from November 1 to 3, 2019, will also feature, among its various projects, Artissima Telephone, an exhibition that will take place in the rooms of OGR...
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The 2019 edition of Artissima, the great contemporary art exhibition-market (more information here), will be dedicated to the dialectic between desire and censorship: the aim of the kermesse is to initiate reflections that concern various themes,...
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Heritage and innovation: these two words could be used to sum up the LuBeC - Lucca Beni Culturali exhibition, which for the past fifteen years has brought to Lucca the most advanced products and practices dealing with topics such as technology, digit...
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The discovery in 2008 of an important correspondence between Telemaco Signorini (Florence, 1835 - 1901), one of the leading painters of the second half of the 19th century and a leading name in the Macchiaioli movement, and his father Giovan...
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The XXXI edition of the Florence Biennale Internazionale dell'Antiquariato, one of the world's leading antique art exhibition-markets, confirms the success of its predecessors: once again this year we saw, among the exhibitors, the main players o...
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The exchange of works between Italy and France for the exhibitions celebrating the 500th anniversary of the disappearances of Leonardo and Raphael (in 2019 the Da Vinci, in 2020 the Urbino) provides that twenty-one works will leave Italy for France, ...
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In the late 19th century, Maud Cruttwell, author of one of the first extensive monographs on Luca Signorelli (Cortona, c. 1450 - 1523), wrote that the great artist from Cortona would be destined to find nothing but bitterness in Rome. Indeed, bey...
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The term of the director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino and the Polo Museale delle Marche, Peter Aufreiter (Linz, 1974), is coming to an end. An Austrian art historian, Aufreiter is one of the foreign directors of autonomous mus...
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It may also make sense to take the side of those who do not welcome the idea of installing a monument to Gabriele d'Annunzio in Trieste: it is not the right historical moment, and at a time of resurgent nationalism the act of the local municipal ...
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If there is one merit to be given to the Minister of Cultural Heritage Alberto Bonisoli, it is that of having put everyone in agreement on his cultural heritage reform: all parties, from the PD to the League, from Potere al Popolo to Fratelli d'I...
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On Aug. 24, 2016, at 3:36 a.m., an earthquake tremor of magnitude moment 6.0 struck central Italy, and in particular the municipalities of Accumoli, Arquata del Tronto and Amatrice, between which was the epicenter of the quake. The area has since b...
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With a mid-August blitz, which follows in the well-established tradition of approving crucial decrees at times of the year when one would expect everyone to be distracted by vacations and festivities (and, this time, with the aggravating factor o...
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More on the monographic exhibition dedicated to Pietro Aretino (Arezzo, 1492 - Venice, 1556), entitled Pietro Aretino and the Art of the Renaissance, which will be held in the Magliabechiana Hall of the Uffizi Gallery from November 27, 2019 to Ma...
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Perhaps it is not a leap to claim that if today, in our imagination, a certain image of Versilia has been formed (an image made up of elegant promenades on the seafront, of vast beaches dotted with umbrellas of all colors, of evenings among fashi...
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For sure, the government crisis opened over the weekend by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini will not collapse the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, but in the aftermath of the publication in the Official Gazette of the reform of the d...
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In November, the Uffizi will open a major exhibition dedicated to the great man of letters Pietro Aretino (Arezzo, 1492 - Venice, 1556), entitled Pietro Aretino and the Art of the Renaissance (Aula Magliabechiana of the Uffizi, from November 27, ...
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Advocates of the demolition of the Pont des Trous, the medieval bridge in Tournai, Belgium, which will be "deconstructed" (this is the politically correct term used to cover reality with a light and transparent veil) to allow the passage of boats...
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Last July 9, a long article, signed by political science researcher Simon Maghakyan, came out in Hyperallergic, calling the annual meeting ofUNESCO 's World Heritage Committee (the committee that decides on sites that are part of, or will become ...
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Until not so long ago, few would have admitted that fake volunteering in cultural heritage is thought to be a great way to replace stable, paid work when needed. And almost no one, of course, would have put it in writing. It was mostly a hallway ...
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In early June, Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (Warsaw, 1943) presented, for the first time in Italy, in Milan, his project Loro (Them), at the same time an installation and a performance: Wodiczko "humanized" some drones by giving them a face a...
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The reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage that, after a year of work, is completing its course these days (at the moment it is still in draft form, so the measures discussed below may be subject to change), contains few new features, but t...
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"There you go. Yes, dear friends, and enemies, and strangers, go fuck yourselves." Thus began a text that Gastone Novelli (Vienna, 1925 - Milan, 1968) wrote between 1964 and 1965 to express all his disappointment, which in this invective was ting...
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Water is, for a painter, one of the most difficult elements to reproduce with the brush. Impalpable, irrepressible, unstable, colorless, transparent. It undulates, it flows, it moves, it ripples, it adapts, it glows, it blurs. Matter and subject ...
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They are already present in postcards of Carrara from the 1950s, they are a familiar presence for anyone who has spent their summers or vacations in the city, they are an important ecological garrison for the production of oxygen and the absorption...
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The National Gallery of Liguria in Genoa, located in the historic Palazzo Spinola, is one of the most active museums in northern Italy. Constant exhibition activity, with small focused focuses on the collections, many initiatives for the public, ...
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When one thinks ofEuropean Union policies and investments, one usually recalls issues such as industrial and agricultural development, viability, integration, and the environment: one hardly associates European policies with cultural heritage. Yet,...
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"He told me his brother Gregorio that in order to pull him along and keep him at painting it set himself to work for shopkeepers, who were then rich and made work, whereupon he worked for the coloraro Nasini alla Sapienza; which by the way the th...
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It is to be hoped that, as soon as the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death are over, all the tiresome, cloying, tedious and pointless controversies that have been accompanying the event for months and that, basically,...
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It was not difficult to predict that Lithuania's pavilion would win the almost unanimous appreciation of the public at the Venice Biennale, as well as many insiders, although, perhaps, it was not so obvious to imagine that the performance curated b...
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One of the most interesting and fruitful achievements of the exhibition Morbelli. 1853 - 1919, the valuable anthological exhibition that the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan is dedicating to Angelo Morbelli (Alessandria, 1853 - Milan, 1919) on t...
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In the vast array of exhibitions that many institutions have reserved for the Italian Ottocento in the last period, it seemed impossible not to pay special attention to the Ottocento project, the vast review, curated by Francesco Leone and Fernando...
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The news has escaped Italy's notice, but it has been causing discussion in the United Kingdom for at least three months: theArt Fund, a major cultural heritage organization (its main mission is to raise funds to donate to public museums for the ...
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One of the first contributions we come across while scrolling through the catalog of the exhibition Antonello da Messina, on view at the Palazzo Reale in Milan until next June 2, is a paper by Roberto Alajmo, who, as is well known, is a writer an...
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Last summer, as soon as the cycle of extraordinary evening openings at the Accademia Gallery in Florence was over, the director of the Florentine institute, Cecilie Hollberg, declared that the initiative had been a great success, and that the suc...
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When artists painted like children. Infantilist primitivism in early 20th century Italian art.In an enterprising exhibition that was mounted at the Mole Antonelliana in Turin in 1990 and was entitled Italian Expressionism, curators Renato Barilli and...
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The heavy damnatio memoriae to which Margherita Sarfatti (Venice, 1880 - Cavallasca, 1961) was forced because of her known ties with the Fascist regime did not allow a serene, full and correct evaluation of her dimension as an art critic, drastic...
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Perhaps one mistake too many has been made in the discussion around the price that will have to be paid to access the Vasari Corridor when it is reopened(45 euros in high season, 20 euros in low season): the debate has focused almost exclusively ...
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Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara is one of the most active exhibition venues in the country. Managed by the Ferrara Arte Foundation, created in the early 1990s and an emanation of the city administration, the Palazzo attracts about 150,000 visitors ...
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He was twenty-nine years old Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar (Václav Hollar; Prague, 1607 - London, 1677) when, in 1636 in Cologne, he had the opportunity to meet one of England's richest and most influential men, diplomat Thomas Howard, X...
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How are Italy's museums doing? What is the future of the recently introduced free admission plan? What are the main problems on which the next reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage will intervene? On the problem of volunteerism used as a su...
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The Paestum Archaeological Park, under the direction of Gabriel Zuchtriegel, an archaeologist born in 1981, has undergone major transformations and has become a very active site. There have been many innovations, from the opening of the deposits ...
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Despite the fact that the figure of Verrocchio (Andrea di Michele di Francesco Cioni; Florence, c. 1435 - Venice, 1488) is universally considered to be among the most significant in the history of art and his achievements are recognized as the ba...
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2018 was the year that set visitor and revenue records for our state museums (in fact, never had such high numbers been recorded : 55 million people flocking to cultural venues and 229 million euros in revenue), but if you want to analyze the data ...
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In the past year alone there have been at least a couple of interesting opportunities that, though unrelated, have offered the public and scholars much material to open up an in-depth discussion on the development of Caravaggism in Genoa. In the ...
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Landscape, Henri-Frédéric Amiel was convinced, reveals a state of our soul. The French philosopher entrusted this thought to his Journal intime drafted between 1883 and 1884: the experience of Friedrich with his panoramas at the window had...
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Minister Alberto Bonisoli said yesterday at his regular meeting with trade unions that there will be 3,600 new hires at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in the time frame leading up to 2021. Of these 3,600 new hires, 1,000 are those provided for...
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Before entering into the merits of the topic of the loans of Leonardo da Vinci's "Italian" works to the Louvre, it must necessarily be premised that, if the masterpieces of the great Tuscan artist were to finally leave for the temporary move to P...
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The never-too-much lamented Tommaso Labranca, whose passing has been forgotten at the speed of light, had little appreciation for the figure of Banksy. Labranca had devoted a chapter of his last book, Vraghinaroda, to the British street artist, r...
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It was not long after the publication of his visionary essay The Spiritual in Art, that Vasily Kandinsky (Moscow, 1866 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944) began to develop the idea of starting to write an almanac that would collect reproductions of the most...
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No doubt hangs that the extraordinary Miracle of the Slave, the monumental canvas that Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, Venice, 1519 - 1594) painted in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, represents a kind of caesura between the youthful phase of...
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There was very little discussion about it, but among the measures contained in the 2019 Budget Law, there was also a cut of 2.35 million euros to autonomous museums, established in paragraph 804 of Article 1: "the institutes and museums endowed w...
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The first contribution on the role of the open window on the landscape in the Romantic era dates back to 1955: it was titled The open window and the storm-tossed boat: an essay in the iconography of Romanticism, and its author, Lorenz Eitner, po...
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There is a myth that has long hovered around our museums and that seems to be rather difficult to eradicate: that of young people not visiting art venues because they would consider it an expensive activity. A conviction that has perhaps even cau...
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The name ofAnton Maria Maragliano (Genoa, 1664 - 1739) will say little to many living outside Liguria. The fame of this sculptor is mostly confined to Genoa and its environs, and past Ventimiglia and Luni (although, more accurately, it would be n...
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In the recent history of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, it is difficult to recall moments that surpass the current one in terms of the real distance between announced measures and concrete results. From the moment he took office, Minister Alb...
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New perspectives for the study of the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. Interview with Michele DantiniArt and Politics in Italy between Fascism and the Republic (Donzelli, 2018) is the latest book by Michele Dantini, contempo...
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The Polo Museale della Lombardia, an entity that brings together several museums in the region including some celebrated sites such as the Cenacolo vinciano, the Rocca Scaligera and the Grotte di Catullo in Sirmione, the Parco Nazionale delle Inc...
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TheEuropean Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, an important document adopted by the European Commission in July 2011, defines integration as a process that aims to get migrants to participate in the society of their host count...
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The year 1929 has gone down in art history as a decisive year for the fate of Surrealism as a whole. That year, the movement founded in 1924 by André Breton (Tinchebray, 1896 - Paris, 1966) confronted crucial events that would mark its history...
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Until January 6, 2019, the Salotto del Cavalier Tempesta, a precious room entirely frescoed by Pieter Mulier known as Cavalier Tempesta (Haarlem, 1637 - Milan, 1701), can be visited in Genoa's Palazzo Nicolosio Lomellino. These frescoes have rece...
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In his Attic Nights, the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the first century of the common era, reported that all young men eager to approach the teachings of Pythagoras were required to observe at least two years of silence: the disciples...
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The tedious and futile nationalist polemics on theItalianity of Leonardo da Vinci, which from time to time are rekindled as a result of the unhinged interventions of some politician in search of easy stereotypes or some boutade that has more to do wi...
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The studio of Andrea Chiesi (Modena, 1966) is in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Modena, just after leaving the city, on the edge of a countryside that loses itself between the Secchia on one side and the provincial road that leads to Carpi on th...
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It may sound like a paradox to some, but it is well known that the Ministry of the Interior manages a vast cultural heritage, one of the most valuable in the world: it is the patrimony of the Fondo Edifici di Culto (FEC), an entity that holds own...
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A "reasonable bet" and a "critical provocation that can only provoke discussion": with such definitions, Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo intended to present a new and suggestive attributional hypothesis for the Holy Family preserved at the Diocesan Muse...
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In a letter sent this morning to her contacts, Paola Marini, director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, bid farewell to the museum, its board of directors, the scientific committee, colleagues, collaborators and, of course, the public: Ma...
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Contrary to what one might believe, the practice of block exchanges of artworks between international museums is not a recent custom. If anything, it is of recent times the custom to give birth to reciprocal loans that feed totally useless exhibi...
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In recent weeks, the entire Italian exhibition scene has found itself, malgré lui, having to suffer the blows of the crossfire of Venerdì di Repubblica and Il Foglio, which came out, a week apart (on September 14 and 21) with two articles s...
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During a speech in the Chamber of Deputies last October 4 that escaped most, the minister of cultural heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, proposed a project that he said should "lead to change": on the surface, all consistent with the title of the confer...
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It is difficult to fully understand Umbrian painting if one has never been to Umbria: there is no art historian who has not remarked how the art of the painters who were active in this portion of Italy is firmly based on close connections with it...
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The very recent affair at the Monfalcone Municipal Library, where the local leghist junta, according to a report in Repubblica, first forced the cutting of subscriptions to Il Manifesto and L'Avvenire and then the failure to make them available t...
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Roberto Chiabrera (Genoa, 1970) is, in our opinion, one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary Italian scene, and perhaps too underestimated: his is an art out of the box (at least out of the Italian box, because there is nothing Ita...
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What happened on Thursday, September 13, during the W l'Italia program on Rete 4, to the director of the Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente Trentina in San Michele all'Adige, Giovanni Kezich, is unacceptable. Unacceptable for two main reasons...
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It is curious to note how the minister of cultural heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, took more than a month (starting the count from the date of theannouncement of the abolition of free Sundays in museums) to give birth to a package of measures that, i...
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Dear friends of Windows on Art,
we believe that a newspaper performs a fundamental service for its readers when, in addition to guaranteeing up-to-date and accurate daily information, it is also able to conduct timely in-depth analysis: that is why ...
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Surely many of those reading this article will have had a chance to see the trailer for Florence, the documentary that intends to take viewers on a discovery of Florence, with the guidance of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. And not a few will...
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Milan is recognized as the economic capital of Italy, and for the past few years it has also intended to assume the role of cultural capital. Not only that: in the last decade, Milan's international prestige has grown considerably, and as part of t...
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It is well known that several art historians manifest some difficulty when called upon to change their register in order to meet with favor and to arouse the interest of the general public. This is not the case for Eugenio Riccomini (Nuoro, 1936)...
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It is disheartening to note that populist bitterness has not spared misplaced comments even on the collapse of the precious ceiling of the church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami in Rome. As if such a serious fact were an event that does not concern...
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Populist rhetoric against the press, in Italy as well as abroad, risks producing nefarious effects on art journalism as well: the problem, pointed out by the editor of The Art Newspaper, Helen Stoilas, in an article last August 16, entails unprec...
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The recent exhibition Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Maremma. Masterpieces from the Territories of Grosseto and Siena, at the Complesso Museale di San Pietro all'Orto in Massa Marittima until September 16, 2018, made it possible to focus attention on the...
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It has a classical and monumental scope in the monograph Il Beato Angelico a Roma 1445-1455. Rebirth of the Arts and Christian Humanism in the Urbe of Nicholas V and Leon Battista Alberti, the latest work by Gerardo de Simone (Castellammare di St...
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Everything is about to be accomplished. This is the title of one of the paintings with which Gianfranco Ferroni (Livorno, 1927 - Bergamo, 2001) participated in the 1968 Venice Biennale. An assortment of objects of different natures, detonators, the...
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Is it possible to tell about art in a light-hearted way, but without losing sight of rigor and depth, without neglecting serious research work? Theanswer is affirmative, and an excellent example of this is the play Gli occhi di Vivian Maier (I'm ...
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The Trieste I have in mind is the one that welcomes a barely 22-year-old James Joyce, who among the streets of the Julian city, which he called his "second homeland," would know poverty and success, joys and disappointments, find inspiration for ...
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In a possible list of the major and most important reference points for studying the history of the arts in Sarzana, a prominent place could certainly be occupied by a work by historian Bonaventura de' Rossi (Sarzana, 1666 - Genoa, 1741), the copious...
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The long-awaited announcement, already foreseeable for a few weeks, has finally arrived: free Sundays in state museums will be abolished. This was said yesterday by the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Alberto Bonisoli, however, specifying that it ...
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Elisa Serafini 's resignation from her role as culture alderman of the Genoa City Council is sensational. Clamorous, of course, but not so unpredictable: Elisa Serafini was one of the most moderate members of a council led by Mayor Marco Bucci, v...
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For Andrea Bianconi (Arzignano, 1974) everything has a direction. When we walk, think, discuss, eat, sleep, make love, perform the simplest of daily actions or plan the most complex decision of our lives, we move following a direction. We walk gu...
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Perhaps, free Sundays have their hours counted and may soon become a thing of the past. Earlier this year, from these pages, the writer had launched the proposal to abolish them and think about alternative forms of incentive, and after recent state...
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In his seminal Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism begun in 1984, Fredric Jameson had summarized, with great clarity, the cultural trend that had been foreshadowed by MacDonald some twenty years earlier and that perhaps more t...
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Interestingly, in the entire catalog of the exhibition Birth of a Nation. Between Guttuso, Fontana and Schifano, currently underway in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi, the word "nation," minus the repetitions in the title, registers only five occurre...
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Last January, in the pages of our magazine, we told you about one of the highlights of the crisis at the Villa Croce Museum in Genoa: in controversy with the city administration, which had granted the paltry sum of seventy thousand euros for the ...
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After the news of the appointment of Milovan Farronato as curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, perhaps few expected that media attention would focus not on the critic's past experience, not on his ideas, not on what contours t...
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"Alberto Bonisoli is someone who has pursued a goal in his years of career: he has aimed to enhance the heritage of made in Italy that we have, to enhance the excellence that we have, and which in some cases is also a tourist attraction. In gener...
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Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Autoritratto, the seminal essay with which Carla Lonzi redefined the boundaries of the art critic's profession, which she herself, after the publication of that writing, decided to abandon. The meaning ...
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It really seems that Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, 1471 - 1528) has timidly begun to share, malgré lui, the fate that has long since befallen his other illustrious colleagues from different eras (Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol and assort...
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All those who visited Cremona's Museo Civico "Ala Ponzone" this winter could not help but have an incomplete experience, probably unsatisfactory for many, since Cremona's best-known museum, from late October to early February, found itself withou...
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In view of the imminent reaching of an agreement between the 5 Star Movement and the Northern League to form the next government, it seems quite legitimate to wonder what will happen to cultural heritage under an executive led by Leghists and Gri...
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When Gabriele D'Annunzio came into contact with the art dealer Alberto Grubicy in 1919, the poet was first involved in a publishing venture that was supposed to produce a book on Gaetano Previati (Ferrara, 1852 - Lavagna, 1920), and then he receive...
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In 1891, when Stéphane Mallarmé found himself in discussion with Jules Huret about the modes and purposes of Symbolist poetry, the great poet told his journalist friend that using a symbol means nothing more than choisir un objet, et en déga...
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To many it will have seemed excessive what art historian Ester Coen wrote a few days ago in Dagospia about Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italy 1918 - 1943, perhaps the most discussed exhibition of this year. Coen's thesis, in essence, focu...
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While you are reading these lines, perhaps during a break in your May Day barbecue, while you are at the beach enjoying a foretaste of summer, or on your couch because you have decided to spend the holiday at home, somewhere in Italy a cultural w...
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A couple of days ago a press release arrived in the newsroom informing us of an initiative being launched in Florence as part of theschool-to-work alternance projects, the institution introduced in 2003 by the Moratti reform in an optional form, ...
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Despite the fact that the public has witnessed in recent years an increase in the number of exhibitions in which the topic of artistic connections between Genoa and Flanders in the seventeenth century was touched upon, the topic of the Flemish in...
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Next Monday, April 23, 2018, Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, 1960), will be in Carrara for the inauguration of the academic year of the Academy of Fine Arts: during the ceremony, he will receive the title of honorary professor and unveil Eternity, the ...
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TheValdichiana, and in particular the Montepulciano area, has experienced a real boom in tourist presences inrecent years. According to the Florence-based Center for Tourism Studies, which processed data provided by the Region of Tuscany and the ...
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The street artist who decided to cover the niche of a 17th-century fountain in Carrara's historic center on Saturday night with strong, acidic and totally out-of-context colors, lime green and shocking pink, cannot help but recall what happened in Pa...
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In one of his seminal essays published in 1985, the great British scholar Michael Baxandall asserted that the problem of so-called "influence" is something of a curse for the art historian. It is a curse, argued Baxandall (the following translati...
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Of the thousands of works produced by the avant-gardists of Visual Poetry from the 1960s to the present, very few use a ceramic medium: a few dozen pieces that do not exceed three hundred. Most of these poems on ceramics have been brought togethe...
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"Restorers on the verge of extinction" was the title, last March 30, of an article by Monica Pieraccini published in the Florentine edition of La Nazione. The journalist reported how before the crisis, in Florence alone, there were at least four ...
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The Genovesino and Piacenza exhibition that recently opened in the rooms of Palazzo Galli, a valuable exhibition venue of the Banca di Piacenza, is more than just an appendix born on the heels of the success of the successful monographic exhibiti...
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The traveler who had happened to be in Florence in 2016, during the warm weather, and to be exact between April 15 and October 2, would have come across an unusual presence in Piazza della Signoria: the space in front of the monument of Cosimo I ...
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Last March 12, a press release from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism circulated the number of applications for the selection of the eighteen students who will take part in the first cycle of the Heritage School course: four hundred i...
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Do not make the mistake of being misled by the title: the exhibition The Last Caravaggio. Heirs and New Masters not only has little to do with the great Michelangelo Merisi (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610), but even questions, as a substantial ...
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Dear Vice President Magnifico,
I learn, from the Emergenza Cultura review, of your response to the article with which I tried to highlight the sad reality behind the celebratory narrative of the FAI Spring Days. I must say that I am gladdened ...
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As has been the case every year since 1993, the arrival of warm weather brings with it the FAI Spring Days, and the approach of the event is accompanied by the usual florilegium of articles with encomiastic tones that, in every headline, celebrat...
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Three works of exceptional quality, three variants on the same theme (that of the Holy Family), three paintings that speak of an artist, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (Viterbo, 1587 - Rome, 1625), eager to escape for some time from the fierce competition ...
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The March 4 elections handed us a result more uncertain than ever and, a week after the polls closed, it is still hard to understand what the future balance in Parliament might be: however, among the scenarios still considered most probable is th...
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Short and tragic was the parabola of the star ofElisabetta Sirani (Bologna, 1638 - 1665), an artist of exceptional virtue, daughter of that Giovanni Andrea Sirani who, from being a pupil of Guido Reni, became his closest and most faithful collabo...
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It is likely that we will remember the election campaign that is (finally) drawing to a close as the bleakest in the entire republican history. And not only for the tones to which the parties were able to arrive, but also for the discouraging absen...
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"My work intersects with archaeology, ethnology or history, although the discourse I create is neither linear nor a narrative history, but consists only of interrupted futures. It is an idea of a set of temporal deviations." These are the words o...
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The news goes back to the end of January: in a major British museum, the Manchester Art Gallery, by decision of director Clare Gannaway, a 19th-century painting by a late Pre-Raphaelite painter, John William Waterhouse (Rome, 1849 - London, 1917), wa...
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In the first room one was greeted by a kind of large formless mass of many colors, with blacks and reds prevailing: an oppressive, distressing mass that occupied almost the entire room and forced visitors to remain almost glued to the walls. The room...
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In the past four years, since Dario Franceschini has held the position of minister of cultural heritage, the sector has undergone momentous changes. There has been the reform of superintendencies, the reform of museums, the reform of the export o...
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It happens, during the first Sunday of the month, the one on which for almost four years the rite offree opening of all state museums, strongly desired by Minister Dario Franceschini, has been celebrated, that there are tourists who, once past the ...
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To tell the story of the origins, the development and the entry into the public patrimony of a collection that two American spouses assembled between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, in the context of a newly-bor...
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More than three million visitors in 2017 (3,237,766 to be precise) making it one of the most visited sites in Italy, a turnover of about fourteen million euros totally allocated to conservation and promotion, effective flow management, lively cultura...
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"On online hatred against immigrants one could collect real anthologies. Between artfully put into circulation hoaxes, xenophobic Facebook pages and irresponsible politicians who, in order to make propaganda, daily feed a racist and intolerant fo...
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One of the last works we know of Giuseppe Arcimboldi, the great sixteenth-century artist also known, more simply, as Arcimboldo (Milan, 1527 - 1593), is one of his highly original self-portraits on paper, preserved today at the Gabinetto dei Dise...
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Today, in the Chamber of Deputies, activists from the campaign Do you recognize me? I am a cultural heritage professional, the initiative created to improve the working conditions of cultural professors, presented the proposed law for the regulation ...
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The idea of rebuilding Selinunte's Temple G, revived yesterday by Vittorio Sgarbi, who since November has been the new culture councillor of the Sicilian regional government and who throughout the election campaign has flaunted the hypothesis of reco...
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Exactly four hundred years have passed since a barely nineteen-year-old Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Naples, 1598 - Rome, 1680) delivered, to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, the Saint Sebastian now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Ma...
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In the past few days, Minister Dario Franceschini has lavished, in decidedly emphatic tones, data on the influx of visitors to Italian museums in 2017: we are talking about a record 50 million visitors who, last year, visited our state institutes...
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The most interesting, valuable and profitable way to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of a museum is to retrace the first years of its history through a sensible exhibition, far from any futile rhetorical intentions, set up on a path cap...
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The writer has long believed that the crude mantra of "Italians first" is one of the main factors polluting current political debate. This demagogic and rambling litany, however, takes on decidedly more obnoxious contours when applied to culture,...
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The road that starts from the seaside village and climbs the hills that serrano it from behind, among palm trees, olive trees and dry stone walls, led in the 1950s to a wasteland and an abandoned farmhouse, dating from who knows what era. Those s...
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Giorgio de Finis was appointed in recent days as the new artistic director of MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. This is important news, because Giorgio de Finis will bring to life a never-before-experienced project that will transform th...
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When in 1610 Galileo Galilei (Pisa, 1564 - Arcetri, 1642) left Padua for the coveted Florence to take up the post of "Primary Mathematician and Philosopher of the Grand Duke of Tuscany," there were not a few in the Venetian city who regretted the g...
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Retracing eight centuries of Genoa 's history through the images of its best-known symbol, the Lantern, in an exhibition that the city is dedicating for the first time to the celebrated lighthouse, the tallest in the entire Mediterranean: this is...
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Maintaining culture in good health is equivalent to taking care of a human body: if one of its organs suffers, it is the body itself in its entirety that will suffer painful consequences. The loss of a library is thus not only an unpleasant event for...
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If we wanted to picture Prato at the dawn of the thirteenth century, we would have to recall the image of an industrious city, at the height of its economic and demographic growth, organized as a free commune from the beginning of the twelfth cen...
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The article you are about to read is the result of long reflection. Not so much on the content, for that would have sprung up almost on the spur of the moment, as on whether or not to publish it: In fact, before doing so, we wondered whether it might...
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"God is dead," came to mind as we walked through the imposing work that Roberto Cuoghi (Modena, 1973) presented at the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale, which ended a few days ago. Dead and lying on a morgue table, disfigured, in an advanced s...
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All it took was a partially misrepresented Corriere della Sera article, a few catchy relaunches with shrewd choices of verbs and nouns to create alarmism, and the natural disinclination of most social media users to delve deeper, to give rise to ...
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There is a particularly apt anecdote to give a measure of the greatness of the genius of Carlo Bononi (Ferrara, c. 1580 - 1632), the great painter to whom Ferrara is dedicating its first monographic exhibition this year, at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. ...
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The history of fake archaeological finds is at least as old as the interest in archaeology. Already Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo's first biographer, recounted that the genius of Caprese "set himself to make of marble a God of love," so similar to an...
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In 1961 Feltrinelli released one of Gillo Dorfles' best-known texts, the seminal Ultime tendenze nell'arte di oggi: the first chapter of the essay, intended to offer readers a compendium of contemporary art from the postwar period onward, was ent...
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In the autumn of 1647, the quiet existence of the city of Cremona, which had experienced nearly two decades of relative calm after the great Manzoni plague, found itself disturbed by the events of the Franco-Spanish war. Cremona, the most important p...
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In 1584, playwright and art writer Raffaello Borghini (Florence, 1541 - 1588) published a treatise in the form of a dialogue "in which painting and sculpture are discussed," and he set it at the "Riposo," the villa that Bernardo Vecchietti, a pat...
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To get an idea of how important and how much esteem the art of the great Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Siena, c. 1290 - 1348) has enjoyed since ancient times, a simple exercise might suffice: scrolling through Lorenzo Ghiberti 's Commentarii and dwelling on t...
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Finding a single answer to the question launched by the already widely discussed New Yorker article signed by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wondered why so many monuments of the Fascist twenty-year period still exist in Italy, is a virtually impossible tas...
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Every self-respecting vacation village always includes in its staff the baleful figure of theimportunate tourist entertainer. The one who, to put it bluntly, strives and struggles to involve in his activities, in more or less coercive ways, the u...
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"The charge I have had on behalf of the Academy is to pray to the Tribunal that it may restore to art one of the finest intelligences, of the most fruitful workers, a young man who is destined for a great future and who, besides doing honor to hi...
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In the broad context of a national exhibition scene that often leaves something to be desired, taken as it is by following the reasons of marketing more often than those of scientific rigor, and increasingly accustomed to cutting off from the major c...
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One could turn a blind eye to the first proposal of the new president of the Fondazione Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, actor and comedian Luca Bizzarri, who at his inauguration last week proposed moving Paganini's violin from Palazzo Tursi to Palazzo D...
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Before beginning to discuss the van Gogh exhibition in Vicenza, the new exhibition-entrepreneurial project of Marco Goldin and his Linea d'Ombra, a brief premise must be advanced: this time the starting point would not be, as with some of his other...
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Admirers of Urs Fischer assure that his Big Clay #4, the great twelve-meter-high work that plunged into Florence's Piazza della Signoria on a sunny late-summer afternoon, has nothing scatological about it: that huge pile of metal, which to most s...
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Last August 9, the Pinacoteca di Brera released its"2016 Annual Report" to take stock of the past year's activities: and this is already news, since few (if any) museums publicly release reports on their activities, for the benefit of anyone who want...
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In recent days, Austrian Culture Minister Thomas Drozda announced that the current director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, will be the next director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Eike Schmidt will therefore leave the Florentine museum at t...
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In order to fully understand the motivations that led the Austrian minister of culture to announce that the current director of the Uffizi Gallery, Eike Schmidt, will go in 2020 to direct the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, it is necessary to loo...
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"To love without bitterness is not possible," sentenced Perottino, the unhappy lover protagonist of the first book of Pietro Bembo's Asolani, a treatise in the form of a dialogue on love, composed between 1497 and 1502 and published in 1505: it w...
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The visitor should not be fooled by the title that, on the surface, would seem to wink at the fiction audience, given the international resonance that the vicissitudes of the Borgias recounted in a recent and successful television series have had...
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One of the best-known cases of reuse of anancient image incontemporary art is the celebrated Mimesis, a 1975 work by Giulio Paolini that apparently consists of a simple pair of casts of the Venus de' Medici placed opposite each other. It was poin...
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I had to reread the sentence several times, since I found it hard to believe that, in the Italy of 2017, there was really a regional alderman capable of uttering such a monstrosity, such a concentration of absence of empathy,political inadequacy,...
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In his work Le surréalisme et la peinture, André Breton offered the most direct and vivid account about the birth of the game of Cadavre exquis, or the "game on folded paper that consists of having several people compose a sentence or drawi...
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There is an ancient, classical and solemn mood that animates the works of Walter Valentini (Pergola, 1928). An Urbino-born artist and Milanese by adoption, like Donato Bramante. An artist accustomed to daily stepping through the doors of the Duca...
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They say that the national sport of Liguria is grumbling: continuous, complaining grumbling, in these parts, is an ingrained habit, a specific character trait, and by now even a quirk, if you will. Yesterday, the appointment of Luca Bizzarri as t...
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And so here we come to the good century of Sienese painting, and here are its most worthy masters. This formula, which Abbot Luigi Lanzi employs in his Storia pittorica d'Italia in order to introduce the chapter devoted to the most notable artists of...
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I wonder if Giovanni Toti, the governor of the Liguria region, has ever read that excellent book by La Spezia journalist Marco Ferrari entitled Mare verticale (Vertical Sea). It is a sort of initiation rite for the fine traveler who wants to vent...
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The recent changes to the admission fee schedule for the Uffizi Gallery and adjoining museums, with prices differentiated for high and low season, have brought the very issue of ticket prices back to the center of the museum debate. Beyond the c...
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An array of clenched fists that struggled, suffered, claimed. A colorful violence of explosions filled with hope. Memories that resurface and chase each other in a present that, Loos taught, inevitably builds on the past. Strangers who travel with us...
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It must not have been an easy task for the curators of the Fuck Hof exhibition to sort through the endless production of Igor Hofbauer (Zagreb, 1974), a Croatian graphic designer and illustrator who is one of the leading figures of the contemporary u...
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At the Exhibition Center of the Albissola Museo Diffuso, the visitor is allowed to admire, displayed in a vitrine, a glazed ceramic depicting a sort of monster with deep-set eyes and a wide-open mouth, which almost seems to stare at the observer....
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The news, just a few days ago, is now well known: Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, has entered the UNESCO World Heritage List. And that was enough for handfuls of nostalgics to claim the achievement as a recognition bestowed on "fascist Asmara," or "f...
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Of Fabio Viale (Cuneo, 1975) I retain a memory (albeit a rather vague one) that goes back to the 2008 Carrara Biennial, when the Piedmontese artist brought to the shadow of the Apuan Alps one of his white marble sculptures that reproduced a paper air...
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The Canons Regular of St. Augustine probably did not imagine that the painting they commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452 - Amboise, 1519) in 1481 would never be finished. Quite the contrary: they waited for years for the great Renaissance...
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A popular assumption states that when giving a gift, what really counts is the thought. Last November Jeff Koons probably took the saying very literally when he announced that he would donate one of his sculptures to the city of Paris as a tribute to...
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"The PD was born to unite, to overcome divisions." Scanning this statement was the minister of cultural heritage, Dario Franceschini, in an interview published yesterday in Repubblica. The call for unity, somewhat belated, comes in the aftermath ...
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The question with which I decided to title this article is obviously rhetorical. In reality, the problems are there. A museum should be a basis for building our sense of citizenship and not simply a location for shows intended for so-called VIPs, or ...
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In the fall of 2015, Antonio Natali, who was preparing to hand over the directorship of the Uffizi to Eike Schmidt, gave one of his last interviews as director to a program on the La 7 network: Questioned as to why art is destroyed (the reference w...
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A sumptuous room for festivities, open to the lush and orderly garden, decorated with stucco and frescoes, and endowed with a majolica tiled floor, as well as a precious set of sculptures: such was the guise that, in 1750, the future doge of Genoa, M...
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One of the surely most interesting moments of the major retrospective that Palazzo Strozzi dedicates to Bill Viola (New York, 1951), is definitely the impact with the public. It hardly happens to see, in an exhibition, groups of people (among them mo...
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The story of the Capocaccia chapel, which opens in the right transept of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, just opposite the Cornaro chapel that houses Gian Lorenzo Bernini'sEcstasy of Saint Theresa, also includes a violent altercatio...
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How could one integrate the collection that engineer Amedeo Lia, a fine and passionate art collector, donated in its entirety to the City of La Spezia in 1995, allowing the city to open the rich museum that now bears his name? This question is pr...
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I have just finished reading, in Corriere della Sera, an interview with Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the only one of the six directors affected by the Tar's ruling to save himself from the annulment of the appointment, due to a formal flaw in the appeal. An ...
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"Decoding, that is the key word in my work in painting today. These paintings, over the years, have gone through different techniques and subjects, from still life to landscape to large hyperrealistic portraits. Today I dissect, decompose, transfigur...
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In the not-too-distant past, one of the greatest contemporary Italian writers wondered whether Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, 1928-New York, 1987) could be ascribed to the category of the tamarins, and the answer could only be soundly assertive. Indeed...
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Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome, must have recently been on a visit to the Tower of London: there, the visitor who wants to look at the Crown Jewels is forced to pass on a treadmill that prevents stopping in front of the precious collection. Or, more p...
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On April 19, 1543, Lorenzo Lotto (Venice, c. 1480 - Loreto, 1556/57) noted in his Book of Miscellaneous Expenses that he had received from "magnifico misser Febbo da Bressa," "per parte de li contra scrittj sua retrattj," the sum of "ducatj diece," "...
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What can one say about Plautilla Nelli (Florence, 1524 - 1588), the nun-artist to whom the Uffizi dedicates an interesting monographic exhibition, without falling into the petty rhetoric that speaks, perhaps a little too rashly, of ante litteram...
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On Wednesday, we brought you the first interview on the reform of the export of cultural property. What follows is the second one, which gives voice to a personality opposed to the new legislation: she is Anna Stanzani, an art historian, among the mo...
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It's business asusual. According to choices as always imposed without a serious to in-depth dialogue with insiders and local communities, two masterpieces by Antonello da Messina, theAnnunciata from Palazzo Abatellis and the so-called Portrait of...
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In the coming days, the competition bill, which contains changes to the Cultural Heritage Code regarding the circulation and export of goods, will be voted on in the Senate.This is a real reform that has been causing debate among operators for mo...
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Luca Pignatelli (Milan, 1962) is an artist rather reluctant to discuss with critics the meaning his works imply and conceal. He recalled this himself at the presentation of his solo exhibition in Carrara, at Palazzo Cucchiari, and the former director...
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Among the great Bolognese painters of the seventeenth century, perhaps Giovanni Francesco Barbieri da Cento, better known as Guercino (Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666), is the one who best exerts his ascendancy over a vast public: certain merit of the gr...
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Thirty-four years of women on the front lines. Of women who have struggled, are struggling and will continue to struggle to gain rights and improve their own (and often men's) condition. Thirty-four years of heated passions, of intense loves, of ...
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A Michelangelo fresco discovered in the countryside in Florentine Chianti. The news, put in these terms (i.e., the way certain media have titled it, with a good dose of sensationalism), would be truly epoch-making: however, as happens whenever th...
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Last March 31, the exhibition "The Struggle of Women" by Tano D'Amico, one of the most important contemporary Italian photographers, opened in Castelnuovo Magra, at the Tower of the Castle of the Bishops of Luni. The artist was present at the opening...
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In one of his most interesting speeches in recent days, the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Dario Franceschini, welcomed the idea of regulating access to Venice's busiest places. A hypothesis that pleases the administration of the Venetian capital: th...
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March 4 marked the end of theFiasellesco year, celebrated to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the commission of the celebrated altarpiece with St. Lazarus asking the Virgin Mary for protection for the city of Sarzana, entrusted to Domeni...
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It should not move one to wonder that the figure of one of the greatest artists of his time such as Arturo Dazzi (Carrara, 1881 - Pisa, 1966) is today almost unknown, and even in his hometown low is the number of those who are able to enumerate some ...
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While in the past few days the attention of part of the world of cultural heritage was being catalyzed by an insubstantial and vacuous editorial by the president of a well-known association, in Florence, amid the indifference of most, something m...
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To the various pieces that, in recent years, have contributed to the reconstruction of the lively and multiform artistic and cultural reality of seventeenth-century Genoa, and particularly that of the first three decades of the century (among the...
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Two weeks are left until the first 2017 edition of Rolli Days, the now famous event that opens the doors of Genoa's historic palaces, including those that were not enrolled in the so-called"rolli" from which the event takes its name. During the two...
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It may have been the fault of the unusual warmth of a Roman evening at the end of February, or the messy traffic of people and vehicles on the Lungotevere at the end of the day, or again (and more likely) the close relevance of the assumptions ...
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The news is from a few days ago: the Pisa City Council approved the project for the construction of a Ferris wheel with a view of the Leaning Tower. The wheel will have a height of fifty-six meters (the same as the Tower) and will be located in t...
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In order to approach the exhibition Artemisia Gentileschi and her time, underway at the Museum of Rome until May 7, in the most correct way, the first necessary condition is to get rid of any preconceptions: before crossing the threshold of Palaz...
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In the age of Power Point politics, it is entirely to be expected that a minister of the republic, now in his third year in office, instead of asking himself what has not worked in that time and what can be improved, will waste and waste time having ...
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Of all the exhibitions seen at the Scuderie del Quirinale, perhaps The Universal Museum. From Napoleon's Dream to Canova is the most ambitious, and certainly one of the most appealing to a public eager to break out of the logic of the blockbuster...
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Documenting the way in which the Roman Baroque taste spread, during the seventeenth century (but also beyond) and with regard to the fields of sculpture and architecture, in the southern Netherlands, a territory corresponding roughly to today's Belgi...
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A splendid "machine of the Blessed Virgin Mary." It is with this expression that an ancient document identifies the marvelous Madonna del Rosario by Giovanni Antonio Cybei (Carrara, 1706 - 1784), a complicated papier-mâché work with a woode...
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It was 1756 when the Prenestine historian Leonardo Cecconi, in his Storia di Palestrina (History of Palestrina), gave an account of a Pietà that was then in the church of Santa Rosalia, and to be precise in the Barberini chapel: it was described a...
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As is well known, in the past few hours the appointments of the ten new directors of national museums have been issued, adding to the twenty appointed in 2015. You have probably also already read the names: Andrea Bruciati (Villa Adriana and Vi...
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Honneur à Rousseau. Honor to Rousseau. The banner hangs on the top floor of the Bateau-Lavoir, the Montmartre building in which Pablo Picasso set up his studio some time ago. All around are streamers and flags, and in the center of the room a tabl...
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What is theavant-garde? For Nanni Balestrini (Milan, 1935), the definition can be broken down and then succinctly summarized with a few basic words. Research. Experiments. Magical revelations. Extraordinary experiments. Of the future. The future. All...
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Four and a half years after the Uffizi's memorable Bagliori Dorati exhibition,late Gothic art is back in the spotlight in an institution of the former Polo Museale Fiorentino, the Galleria dell'Accademia, with an exhibition dedicated to one of the mo...
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It was not enough, with respect to young graduates in the cultural heritage sector, to mock the call for civil service in museums with its offer of work disguised as volunteer work. No: we managed to reach an even lower point. The day before yesterda...
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Gombrich said that when we look at a painting (or a work of art in general), we often don't think about the enormous efforts, sacrifices, and sleepless nights that an artist has spent studying a detail, choosing the right shade of color for a detail,...
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After last year's excellent exhibition dedicated to Silvestro Lega, expectations for the 2016-2017 appointment of the Matteucci Center for Modern Art Foundation in Viareggio could only be decidedly high. Not least because, for this year's exhibit...
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Singing the poetry of the sea. Not an easy task, for which a visceral love for the sea is indispensable, one that also manages to substantiate itself in an intense, passion-filled, continuous, close relationship. Free man, always you will love the se...
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We bring you today, as the first article of 2017, a lengthy interview with Cristiana Collu, director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, on the criticism received by the Time is out of jointproject , the Gallery's new exhi...
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Is there, on the contemporary scene, an artist who, in terms of power, strength of message, vitality, originality, can somehow be compared to Michelangelo? It is a difficult question to answer, but if we had to express a shortlist of candidates, we...
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As a young boy I was an avid reader of Wolf Albert. I remember that, in an issue about fifteen years ago, a Christmas story had been published in which the farm animals, as the holidays approached, had begun to protest against Santa Claus, guilty o...
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If we were to try to enter any bookstore today, we would find the literary labors of Stefano Guerrera (the one from "If Paintings Could Talk," the Facebook page where he publishes pictures of works of art accompanied by nice - or at least such in the...
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Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Picasso, Braque. And then of course he, the great protagonist, Ardengo Soffici (Rignano sull'Arno, 1879 - Vittoria Apuana, 1964). The names and prerequisites to turn the first-ever monograph...
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The painter Carlo Giuseppe Ratti had been rather peremptory when, in his Instruzione, a sort of eighteenth-century "tourist guide" to Liguria, he said, about the church of San Donato in Genoa, that the only notable panel, which is preserved there, is...
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Before we start talking about the case of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Mercy, which has been split off from its Polyptych (one of the greatest masterpieces of the Italian Quattrocento) and sent to Milan for the Christmas holidays, a clarifi...
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When Alois Riegl presented in 1901 his concept of Kunstwollen, which we had discussed in the article devoted to the Vienna School of which Riegl himself was one of the leading exponents, a clear definition of what this "will to art" was through whi...
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If there is one thing to praise and admire in Luca Beatrice, the curator of the exhibition Andy Warhol. Pop Society currently underway at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, it is his persevering and courageous tenacity. And this tenacity is embodied in his...
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I read with ever-growing dismay and disgust the news around the return of paintings belonging to the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, stolen in November last year, found in Ukraine, and for months still waiting to return to Italy. Bewilderment and...
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The movement of works by great artists kept in permanent collections, especially when it comes to sending them to temporary exhibitions, is increasingly becoming a political operation before it is a scientific one. The underlying reason is quickly st...
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Last year, on these pages, we had written about how the city of Prato is known, among other things, for the cult of the Sacred Girdle, or the belt that Our Lady allegedly gave to St. Thomas as proof of the Assumption into heaven. Or so it is believed...
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A document from 1602, referring to a painting by Caravaggio (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610), informs us that the great Lombard painter had received "from Ill.re sr. Ottavio Costa a bon conto d'un quadro ch'io dipingo gli venti schudi di moneta th...
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The name of Salvador DalÃ, who has entered the ranks of the greats of art history almost by popular acclaim, is one to use if, for an exhibition, you want to play it safe. Given, therefore, the abundant exhibition production that has made use of t...
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I have been following Jerry Saltz's Facebook account for months now; I find filtering U.S. society through the eye of an art critic a decidedly interesting way to try to learn more about it. The day before yesterday, in the aftermath of Donald Trump ...
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Time is out of joint, the "new installation in the form of an exhibition" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, curated by Cristiana Collu, has had the effect of creating two opposing factions: that of critics and that of enthusiasts. We h...
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One of the most innovative and original art historians of the twentieth century was, without a shadow of a doubt, Roberto Longhi (Alba, 1890 - Florence, 1970): precocious talent (before he was thirty years old he had already written fundamental essay...
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A girlish face, with an olive complexion and refined features of a purity difficult to find in other works of art. The deep black eyes, which, with a slightly downward gaze, communicate hesitation, lingering, shyness, perhaps even a little discomfort...
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One of the most important works in the history of Western art, the earliest example of Christus Triumphans of which we have any knowledge (at least according to the date that appears on the epigraph, which sets 1138 as the date of its creation), a pa...
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The much credit that Valerius for so many of his worthy works had acquired, moved Signor Francesco Maria Balbi to give him the care of painting in fresco the gallery of his sumptuous palace located in the wide street, which takes its name from th...
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The great art historian Erwin Panofsky (Hanover, 1892 - Princeton, 1968) has been considered, and continues to be considered, a continuator of the work of Aby Warburg, who in turn is considered an anticipator of Panofsky. All this is true to a certai...
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You cannot stem the sea, "you cannot stop the sea." The phrase is stamped on a suitcase tag, the one that usually carries the number to call in case the owner loses it. But, this time, the loss is to be considered lucky, and even happier will be the ...
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It's true: "raising awareness about the importance of motor activity" is probably the last thing on the minds of serial buffet assailants at exhibition openings, figures to whom anyone who frequents the art and museum environment is surely accustomed...
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The Giorgio Conti Foundation in Carrara continues its 2016 programming with what we can consider the year's flagship exhibition, Grand Tour Cities from the Hermitage and Apuan Landscapes from Italian Collections, curated by Sergej Androsov and Massim...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itCritics have only recently discovered the interesting figure of Maria Teresa Mazzei Fabbricotti (Florence, 1893 - Carrara, 1977), an artist who has always remained relegated to the margins of the best...
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In the Paris of the early 1970s, it was not uncommon to come across a man with a bizarre appearance: tall and thin, dressed as a modern bohemian, long hair framing a face with vaguely Middle Eastern features, a gaze always absorbed to the point of lo...
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It is certainly not to be discovered today that many Florentines are now pervaded by motions of indignant revulsion toward all works ofcontemporary art that dare to invade the streets and squares of the so-called "cradle of the Renaissance": the ...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itIn today's edition of Buona domenica, the column that has long cheered the day off of La Nazione readers, Cristina Lorenzi states that Carrara's historic center "will have to be an area in which to in...
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A few days ago, our friend Fabrizio Federici, an expert art historian and author of numerous essays and scholarly articles on the seventeenth century, a signature of Artribune, as well as administrator of the successful Facebook page"Mo(n)stre," rais...
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Thegreater the strength of the artist, the more accomplished form the predicate has, the weaker that predicate is, the more undeveloped the subject expressed in a periphrasis. So wrote the German art historian Aby Warburg (Hamburg, 1866 - 1929, real ...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itAmong the most interesting exhibition events of the summer (and dare I add "nationally") one cannot but include the exhibition that CAMeC in Spezia dedicates to the seminal figure of Giulio Turcato (M...
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All those who, in Milan, visit the Castello Sforzesco, more or less halfway through find themselves, almost suddenly, in a room that is as unusual as it is evocative: above the walls, in fact, the visitor sees intricate foliage of trees and plants gr...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itAfter the interesting exhibitions of Daniel Spoerri and Andrea Aquilanti, the last two "main events" of Marble Weeks remained to be reviewed: the exhibitions of Remo Salvadori (Church of Tears, Cathe...
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Long is the list of artists who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the dawn of modern sports, began to take an interest in a wide variety of sports, to the point of becoming athletes themselves: Gustave Caillebotte in his spare...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itThe title of an art exhibition can be powerfully revealing. Often it is so in a negative way: those familiar with the world of exhibitions by now already know more or less what to expect from the titl...
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Art and sport. Soccer according to Ugo GuidiBologna, September 9, 1934. On the field of the Stadio Littoriale, as today's Stadio Renato Dall'Ara was then called, the return final of the Mitropa Cup was being played. Which did not have the formula dev...
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Anyone who has had anything to do withcontemporary art (even by simply seeing a picture of a work on Facebook, for example), knows that there are many people who, when confronted with an object whose form is not immediately recognizable and whose mea...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itYes, you are right: there is not much point in writing a review of an exhibition after it has closed and therefore when it is no longer possible to go and visit it. My fault that I went to see it in d...
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A competition at the ministry marks maturity, sang CCCP. The problem is that, for candidates in the competition for 500 civil servant positions at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, maturity comes late, indeed: very late. From even a superficial ...
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We resume our brief history of art criticism to talk about one of the most important scholars of the past: Bernard Berenson, born Bernhard Valvrojenski (Butremanz, 1865 Florence, 1959). Originally from Lithuania and emigrating to the United States wi...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itWanting to interpret the exhibition Doppio movimento (Double Movement ), which in Carrara, in the spaces of the former San Giacomo Hospital, hosts some works by Andrea Aquilanti, we could say that the...
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A couple of weeks ago, news of Milo Moiré's arrest caused quite a stir when she was stopped by London police during her Mirror Box performance, which she was holding in Trafalgar Square, and then taken to a cell, where she was subjected to a twent...
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Dear Dr. Giordano,
as I was reading the article you signed today for the newspaper Libero(All the fault of archaeologists), I could not resist the temptation to ask myself a question: what are the qualities that should belong to a good journalist?...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.it.Few musicians manage to divide the public like Giovanni Lindo Ferretti. On his account continue to clash the opinions of those who resent the stances of recent years and those who have decided to rem...
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Nowadays, the habit of making, at least in the area of culture, unselfish gestures moved solely by true passion is perhaps being somewhat lost. It has become normal to assume that an act performed toward culture should be matched by an appropriate re...
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When, exactly three years ago, Matteo Renzi, as mayor of Florence, closed Ponte Vecchio to allow a gathering of wealthy Ferraristi who had had the nice idea of dining on Florence's best-known bridge, it was hoped that it was more unique than rare. No...
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Article originally published on culturainrivera.itI have been following, somewhat from a distance and somewhat bored, the controversy triggered by Paris Mazzanti, former director of Internazionale Marmi e Macchine, regarding the 2016 edition of Marbl...
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For those accustomed to watching some art history on TV, the figure of Costantino D'Orazio will certainly not constitute news. On the other hand, for those who are not familiar with him, this is a ubiquitous character whose role is to popularize ar...
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As is well known, so much criticism has rained down on The Floating Piers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude 's work on Lake Iseo, in recent days. The problem is that very little has been said about the art, and so much about the side dish. For example: when...
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For many people commenting on the web, The Floating Piers, the large installation by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude partnership (which, after Jeanne-Claude's passing in 2009, has been reduced to the figure of Christo alone), would not be classifiable ...
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Look up here, I'm in heaven / I've got scars that can't be seen / I've got drama, can't be stolen / Everybody knows me now. These are the words with which David Bowie decided to open Lazarus, his last single, released a few days before his death. A s...
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"Vetruvius architect puts in his work of architecture that the measurements of homo are of nature disstributed in this way. That is, that 4 diti makes a palm and 4 palms makes a foot; 6 palms makes a cubit, 4 cubits makes a homo, and 4 cubits makes a...
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One of the sleaziest initiatives hatched from the mind of the current prime minister has finally come to an end: bellezza@governo.it. That is, an e-mail address to which to send reports of cultural projects to be funded, or of cultural places in need...
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Those who, until June 5, would like to enter the CAMeC in La Spezia (a city from whose toponym, as an inhabitant of the area, I carefully omit the article) to see how a group of thirteen contemporary artists questions the concept of community in toda...
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I got to know Soviet Soviets relatively recently, that is, in 2014, when I saw them for the first time in concert, in my neck of the woods. However, they have been in activity since 2008, and since I consider them the best Italian band among thos...
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Yes, it is true: the title of this article is deliberately provocative. However, perhaps this is the best way to pay proper tribute to the figure of Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa, 1667 - 1749) who, we make no secret of it, is one of our favorite pai...
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The temples of Paestum had really had it rough in the 1740s. At that time, in fact, the King of Naples, Charles III of Bourbon, had recently begun some rearrangement work at the Royal Palace in the Neapolitan city, and one of the court architects, Fe...
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For those who were not present in Rome last weekend, we publish below the video and full text of our Federico Giannini's speech (titled "Heritage, the Net, the General Public") as part of the conference held in Rome on May 6 for the "Emergenza Cultur...
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In 1946, Lucio Fontana (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968) is a forty-seven-year-old man, well aware that the world in which he is living has undergone profound changes. World War II has just ended: he has preferred to avoid it, settling ...
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Ofabstract art there is often a distorted perception: in the eyes of many people who have little familiarity with these forms of expression, abstract compositions seem almost dictated by chance, not regulated by a precise order, created through t...
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I was pleased to read, in News-Art, Michele Cuppone 'sarticle on the display of Caravaggio 's Flagellation in Monza. Not only because my book Un patrimonio da riconquistare (A Heritage to Regain) is mentioned in the article, but also and especially b...
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Anyone who has (or has had) anything to do with the history of art criticism must at some point or another have come across the figure of Konrad Fiedler (Öderan, 1841 - Munich, 1895), one of the greatest philosophers of art who lived in the 19th ...
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Concerning Caravaggio 's (Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610) celebrated Conversion of St. Paul in the Cerasi Chapel, a painting that represents one of the Lombard artist's best-known and most discussed masterpieces, there is a widespread interpretatio...
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The great Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Albi, 1864 - Saint-André-du-Bois, 1901), as is well known, was a frequent visitor to the brothels of late 19th-century Paris. In recent times we have seen a renewed interest in this important artist, an int...
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Also by this Painter, and of his most specious frescoes, are those which stand out above the doors leading to the gallery in the palace of the Most Excellent Marcello Durazzo of the late Gio.Luca: and they represent Prometheus, who animates man; Herc...
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In the country in which megaphones, more or less jammed and more or less accustomed to profanity, have sometimes proven to transform endorsement for a cause or a movement into concrete political action, there are strips of land that, for various ...
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In the last months of 2012, an exhibition with the eloquent title Van Gogh, rêves de Japon, or: "Van Gogh, dreams of Japan," opened at the Pinacothèque de Paris. The exhibition aimed to document the influence thatJapanese art had exerted on the...
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In 2008, a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Valerio Castello ( Genoa, 1624 - 1659), the greatest genius of the Genoese Baroque (and the exhibition was in fact titled Valerio Castello 1624 - 1659. Modern Genius). On that occasion, an intere...
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In his talk at the conference on the great scholar Adolfo Venturi (Modena, 1856 - Santa Margherita Ligure, 1941), held in 1992, art historian Claudio Strinati recalled how one day Venturi was in Milan visiting the home of Giovanni Morelli, who wanted...
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At the beginning of the year, Christian Omodeo, the curator of the highly contested Bologna exhibition on street art that will open on March 18 at Palazzo Pepoli, was interviewed by Artribune about the controversy that arose around an exhibition that...
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In recent times, the scourge of so-called one-painting shows, i.e., exhibitions in which a single work of art is the protagonist, has been spreading with increasing worrying rapidity. Not necessarily a painting, as the locution, recently introduc...
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Those who are interested in the vicissitudes of Florentine museums will certainly not have missed the debate that has been going on in recent hours around the fate of the Vasari Corridor in Florence, which connects the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace. Tha...
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TheItalian public seems to be unaccustomed to source verification, that particular practice that many indicate by the anglicism fact checking and which consists, precisely, in ascertaining the veracity of certain information by going back to the sour...
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He was also Cosimo's lover and exalter of literate men; and therefore he brought to Florence Argilopolo, a man of the Greek nation and in those times most literate, so that from him the Florentine youth might learn the Greek language and its other do...
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That Carrara has long been traversed by a climate of very high indignation towards the city's administration is a well-known fact: there are too many problems afflicting Carrara (which we have often talked about on these pages as well: environmental ...
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The recent exhibition on Piero di Cosimo (1462 - 1522) at the Uffizi (and, even before the latter, the immediately preceding retrospective held at the National Gallery in Washington) had, among others, the merit of bringing together a good part of th...
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In the last episode of our history of art criticism, we had talked about Julius von Schlosser (1866 - 1938) and introduced the Vienna School, the important group of scholars, of which Schlosser was one of the youngest exponents, who contributed to th...
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For the past few weeks, posts from Linea d'Ombra, the company of the never tame Marco Goldin, have been raging on my personal Facebook wall. Italy's most prolific curator seems to have kicked off a pressing publicity battle, including on social m...
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From the moment it was established, now twelve years ago, Remembrance Day has in fact cleared the most boorish and petty neo-fascist propaganda, for which it would seem that there is no memory resulting from the combination of all the events that o...
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I met Eike Schmidt in person toward the end of the year, when I interviewed him for Art and Dossier (the interview came out in shortened form in the January issue and the full interview will be posted online shortly): he gave me the impression that h...
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We resume, with this article, our brief history of art criticism that we had begun with the small contributions on the figures of Giovanni Morelli and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle: to introduce the topic of this new "installment" in the series, we ...
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That underlying yesterday's government reshuffle is a desire to better succor the visions of the Catholic component of the majority? The Ministry of Culture has in fact become one and three: as of yesterday we can therefore boast of having as many as...
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Hassan Rouhani is an intelligent man and an able politician. And he is an educated man: he even studied in Europe. It is hard to think that the statues in the Capitoline Museums, covered up not yet known by whose initiative, could have offended his s...
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Until yesterday, I had heard the adjective"holistic" pronounced in only two contexts: in advertisements for massage centers that practice, precisely, holistic massage, and in those marketing courses that, instead of aiming straight at the bottom line...
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A couple of weeks ago we told you about some intense paintings by Luciano Borzone (1590 - 1645) that you can admire, until February 28, 2016, at the exhibition "Luciano Borzone. Vivid Painter in Early Seventeenth-Century Genoa," the first monographic...
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If you find yourself discussing rock with someone who has sufficient musical culture and at the same time a certain intolerance of stars, you will most likely hear that David Bowie was not a genius because he did not invent anything. Because the ...
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It may sound strange, but in order to better understand the development of the art of Carlo Portelli (early 1500s - 1574), an artist who has never been to Rome to our knowledge, it is necessary to start precisely from Rome: in 1539 Francesco de' ...
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Never missing from any self-respecting Christmas dinner is the intrusive figure of the old aunt who gives her nephew the usual, atrocious and dreaded technicolor lozenge heavy wool sweater with figures of reindeer and snowflakes. Since time immemoria...
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To those not very familiar with seventeenth-century Genoese painting, the name of Luciano Borzone (1590 - 1645) will perhaps say little or nothing. Too many circumstances have played against the fortunes of this artist, beginning with the fact that h...
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"It is difficult to discover the meaning of the allegory that Bellini painted. The Virgin, seated on a terrace overlooking a lake, receives the homage of a kneeling woman, accompanied to the right and left by standing figures whose identities have no...
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The Milan exhibition on Giotto (1267 - 1337) had, in my opinion, one of its two peaks in the display of the Baroncelli Polyptych reunited for the occasion with the cusp of the central panel (the other peak, however, can be identified in the presence ...
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There are good margins of certainty to say that, in this day and age, we would all have ignored the name of Carlotta Chabert, a mid-nineteenth-century ballerina, were it not for one specific circumstance: the fact that she was the mistress of a wealt...
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Until the 19th century, it was very rare, if not almost impossible, to find artists who chose a specific title for one of their works. As a result, the designations by which we are now familiar with a great many masterpieces, even world-famous ones, ...
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In the first "installment" of this small series of articles devoted to the history of connoisseurship, we had made a very quick reference (highlighted mainly in the comments to the discussion that arose around the same article) to an important te...
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Lorenzo di Credi, Venus (c. 1490-1494; oil on canvas, 151 x 69 cm; Florence, Uffizi)
Lorenzo di Credi 's very special Venus could have had no other fate than oblivion: the solidity of her proportions, which in certain anatomical details would...
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He then portrayed Bronzino to Duke Cosimo Morgante naked dwarf all whole, et in two ways, that is, on one side of the painting the front and on the other the back, with that extravagance of monstrous limbs that dwarf has, which painting in that genre...
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In an article that appeared on November 30 in Articolo 21, Vittorio Emiliani sketched what, in his opinion, would seem to be a desolating panorama of theinformation on cultural heritage that can be found in the media nowadays: it would be, in oth...
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When newspapers present us with a new artistic discovery, we always witness the stances of various scholars, who either take sides in favor of an attribution to a particular artist, or take completely contrary views, tracing the work back to othe...
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Everything has been written about Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), but despite this, several questions still remain about many aspects of his art. There is one, in particular, that divides scholars dealing with his work: was Andy Warhol a disenchanted and ...
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With this article, with its deliberately provocative title, I would like to return to the subject of the robbery at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, also in light of the latest developments in the affair: we feel it is our duty to continue to focu...
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We at Windows on Art have visited Verona's Castelvecchio Museum many times-we consider it one of our favorite museums. So it was a very hard blow to read, this morning, the news of the egregious robbery that allowed a gang of thugs to steal sevente...
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When you want to refer to a union, a passage or a connection, I think the most commonly used image is that of the bridge. But the bridge is also a metaphor for change, for life flowing and being renewed. Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine / Et no...
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To describe the imagery and art of the Cuban sculptor AgustÃn Cárdenas (1927 - 2001), it is possible to use a metaphor that is not new to his sculpture, but nonetheless effective. It is necessary to imagine making love to a woman (necessarily...
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It took Tomaso Montanari and Pablo Echaurren to unravel the usual skein of lavish, unconditional but mostly prone and clueless praise that accompanied yet another arrival in Italy of an artist who enjoys minimal international fame: and, as far as the...
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It is a bit like entering a pagan temple. And in some ways even a sumptuous aristocratic residence, if you prefer. What is certain is that the sacred and the religious seem to be relegated to a marginal role: these are the feelings one gets when ...
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The arrival ofFrenchImpressionism, in Florence and Italy, occurred during a very specific occasion: the Florentine Promotrice exhibition of 1878. The Promotrice was a society, established in Florence in 1843 as the Società Promotrice delle Bel...
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When thinking of the Impressionists, most tend to enumerate the typical textbook names: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, sometimes Sisley and Pissarro. After all, the painters just mentioned can be considered the masterminds of what is perhaps the be...
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Often, "laymen" are wont to attribute a lower value to drawings than to paintings: but drawing is a fundamental means of understanding the dynamics of the artist's creative process and of getting to know his style better, as well as of drawing import...
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Any art history textbook in which the figure of Piero di Cosimo (1462 - 1522) is outlined certainly does not discount his eccentric and, as Federico Zeri had to add, unconventional nature: they all report the oddities and quirks of his character....
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With the usual demented practice ofannouncement on social networks and by press release, without, however, releasing the full text of the measure, yesterday the Council of Ministers approved the decree-law, consisting of a single article, which state...
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Still, after a normal union assembly of the workers of the Special Superintendence for the Colosseum (SSCol) in Rome, legitimately and regularly communicated a week ago, we have to witness the screeches of our politicians, who just don't like the i...
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We have to say it: we really like literary festivals. So, when we do, we try to attend them. The dates have multiplied, the lectures and presentations are almost always of high quality, and on the side there are always lots of really interesting even...
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Among the walls of the Rocca di Vignola, there is a chapel full of charm and filled with symbolic references, which allows us to take a journey through centuries of history: it is the Contrari Chapel, whose events probably began in the third decade o...
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The affair of new museum directors, which we have also discussed on several occasions and given ample space to both in our press review and on our Facebook page, continues to hold the headlines and to be the constant focus of attention of a now very ...
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When faced with the eventuality of having to replace with fresh forces, for whatever reason, a worker who has always performed his or her duties admirably, there are two options. The one widely practiced consists of sincerely thanking the person be...
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If one were to derive a message from the appointment of the twenty directors of the new state museums, whose names were published this morning on the MiBACT website, that message would speak of a radical break with the past-but up to a point.
Tha...
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The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in his 1974 essay, The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities ("The Divorce between the Sciences and Humanistic Culture"), identifies in the thought of the antiscientist philosophers of the eighteenth c...
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If I had to name two or three of the most fascinating painters in the history of art, on one name I would have no doubt, and I would assign a place in this special ranking to Giorgione. It is of him that I want to tell you about in this post.... or r...
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While, here in Italy, many are still squabbling over the Pompeii workers'union assembly that raised a (pointless) fuss in late July, in London some 200 National Gallery employees belonging to the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union have decl...
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When Ettore Tito (1859 - 1941) exhibited his marvelous work July, which had just been completed, at the 1894 Esposizioni Riunite in Milan, the writer Leone Fortis, who dedicated a book to those Expositions, described the painting as a "scene of bathi...
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Despite appeals, articles and choruses of authoritative voices against it, yesterday the Madia bill was approved in the Senate and thus became law. Of course, it is a proxy law and, to see it in full operation, it will be necessary to wait for th...
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At the recent exhibition on Palma the Elder (c. 1480 - 1528, real name Jacopo Negretti), held at GAMeC in Bergamo, there was on display, among others, an important and interesting painting, the so-called Unfinished Portrait, kept at the Uffizi. I...
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In the past few hours, about theunion assembly that resulted in a partial closure of the Pompeii excavations this Friday, we have heard anything and everything. It is a pity that the media have only given relevance to the statements of the various po...
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As in 2014, again this year, in the middle of summer, the enemies of cultural heritage are beginning to oil the gears of their machine. In 2014, also in July, evidently taking advantage of the summer atmosphere, the close vacations and the conseque...
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Pariter praecepta volandi / tradit et ignotas umeris accomodat alas. / Inter opus monitusque genae maduere seniles, / et patriae tremuere manus.
"While teaching him to fly, behind his back he applied those wings he had never seen. And between th...
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Rome, end of 2016. The junta led by Ignazio Marino, overwhelmed by yet another aftermath of the Mafia Capitale investigation, falls thunderously. In its place takes office a mayor from the renzian area who, to boost (according to him) the world image...
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For some time now in Italy there has been the baleful custom of celebrating anniversaries concerning famous artists (births, deaths, realizations of famous works of art and whatnot) with the most atrocious gimmicks, which in the intent of those org...
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Perhaps it is not yet the case that we prefer Vittorio Sgarbi in the guise of a "mover of works of art," as Tomaso Montanari recently called him, but we can certainly say that, as a polemicist, good Vittorio seems to lack the refinement that such a d...
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In the week between June 1 and 6, 1977, the International Week of Performance, curated by Renato Barilli, took place at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna: a series of events attended by some of the world's best exponents of performance ...
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A lot of people have been talking about it: yesterday, the House Constitutional Affairs Committee met to discuss the Public Administration bill, and among the various amendments approved during the proceedings, there is one that has been much discu...
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Let's start with a small premise: as is well known, soon twenty museums hitherto dependent on the Ministry of Culture and linked to their superintendencies will become autonomous. This is what was envisaged by the MiBACT reform devised last year by...
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Louis Bienaimé, Shepherdess (1837; St. Petersburg, Hermitage)
"A gentle Shepherdess vaguely coiffed in symmetrical group her hair, has on her forehead the most graceful thought. She meditating studiously and quietly inclines her head a little to ...
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One could venture a very precise date to establish the "official" beginning of the Veronese Renaissance: July 31, 1459, the day on which the celebrated San Zeno Altarpiece was placed on the high altar of the Basilica of San Zeno in Verona, in the pre...
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Mattia Preti depicts his Vanity as a richly attired woman, with a turban framing a face invested with light and which, together with her inspired expression, is somewhat reminiscent of certain solutions by Domenichino, and with a robe covered by a li...
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Exactly one year ago, day more, day less (it was June 19), Education Minister Stefania Giannini triumphantly announced the return of art history to school: "we will introduce the study of art history, in all levels of high schools, starting from the ...
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If there is one thing that the Ministry of Culture has learned to do really really well in recent years, this thing is the production of promotional videos. Especially if they are ugly. Like the very famous If You Don't Visit It We'll Take It Away, w...
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In his A cosa serve Michelangelo?, Tomaso Montanari wrote, with good reason, that it has become quite difficult to read negative reviews of exhibitions in major national newspapers: only "positive or, better yet, celebratory" reviews. However, it is ...
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The one that just passed will be remembered as one of the most pathetic election campaigns in recent history. We have seen all kinds of things: Salvini who, in between the now customary rants against immigrants, exploited images of a wounded anarchis...
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While wandering around the halls of Monselice Castle yesterday as part of our #villeinblue press tour, we came across a fresco depicting a Madonna of milk (i.e. depicted in the act of suckling Baby Jesus: this type of representation is also known by ...
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One of the lesser-known strands of the great Leonardo da Vinci's production is drawing on canvas, which, although not practiced as frequently as drawing on paper, was nevertheless sometimes experimented with by the artist. One of the first biographer...
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It is not easy to keep a reader glued to a book about the relationship between Isabella d'Este and the arts: because the subject matter is not the easiest, because the history of the Mantuan Renaissance is much less well known than that of other rena...
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Andrea Emiliani is one of the most eminent figures in the history of Italian art: a great scholar, a pupil of Roberto Longhi and Francesco Arcangeli, he is also known for having been an excellent superintendent for the cultural heritage of Bologn...
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Let us start with a premise: violence is never justifiable. And starting from this premise, let us add a corollary: especially when it harms an idea to the advantage, instead, of those who deviously entrench themselves behind a familiar and reassurin...
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There will come a time when silence will be louder than the voices that today throttle(August Spies)
Chicago, United States of America, May 1, 1886. Labor unions organize a strike to demand better working conditions from the bosses. In particular,...
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We are used to it by now, dear young friend and dear young friend who happened upon the lines of this post: not a day goes by without there being someone whose original gimmick leaps to mind to make you out to be no-good, picky and slackers. To c...
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What do Lorenzo Lotto, Francesco Cairo, Bartolomeo della Gatta and Virgilio Guidi have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, if only because they are all painters. As of these days, however, they can boast that all four have a new common trait: ...
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It is well known that Piero della Francesca was not only an outstanding artist but also a highly accomplished treatise writer. Anyone who has studied even a modicum of Renaissance art history has always known that the great Tuscan artist wrote four t...
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Everything has been written about Giorgione 's Tempest, but any new contribution that can help, in a serious way, to shed light on the great mystery that has been posing questions to all who observe it for centuries is always welcome. For, as is well...
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Let us imagine a Dutch boy of just eighteen who had recently arrived in Rome. And let us imagine that this boy is none other than Gerrit van Honthorst: a young man who already had a good education, because in his homeland he had studied with Abraham ...
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While there was (and still is) discussion in Carrara about the article, published on our website a few days ago, about the vicissitudes that have affected the last six years of the presidency of the city'sAcademy of Fine Arts, a new, onerous stone ha...
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"Blockbuster exhibitions encourage an idiotic approach to art. We think we have the best possible opportunity to see a certain artist or a certain art-historical period, we think that by seeing an exhibition on Jackson Pollock or Botticelli, we w...
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"Goldin is tired of criticism, committees opposed to the use of Santa Caterina for the exhibition and art historians pontificating about the quality of his projects." So wrote, on February 24, 2015, the Treviso Tribune in an article by Alessandro Zag...
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The matter is quite well known: Italy recently had to enact a law, Law 97 of August 6, 2013, which through one of its articles (Article 3) will allow guides from other European countries to be able to practice their profession in Italy. This is to ma...
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An article, published yesterday in Repubblica and signed by Tomaso Montanari, in which the author rails against the cuts in funding for the National Central Library of Florence, which goes from more than one million euros in 2014 to a mere 196,397 eu...
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An art history book that looks a lot like a civics book: after all, what is art history for if not to educate, as well as to excite and move minds? We could summarize in this way the interesting book The Good of All, written by Mariella Carlotti and ...
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Are you familiar withTuscan art from just about every era, from the Middle Ages to the present, via the Renaissance and the Macchiaioli? If there is a hallmark of Tuscan art that cuts across the tastes, styles, eras and personal inclinations of t...
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The first thing I would like to know about the damage to the Barcaccia in the Spanish Steps, a fundamental masterpiece by Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is what kind of consideration the quaestor of Rome Nicolò D'Angelo has for art. Far be it fr...
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If you happen to be passing through Massa by March 15, take some time to visit the Diocesan Museum and the exhibition The Nativity by Nightlight. We had already told you about it in our first article written in The Daily Slow, and we are returning to...
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One of the big problems we face if we decide to visit the Scrovegni Chapel is theshort time we are allowed to visit: just a quarter of an hour. Our Ilaria had already told you about this in an article in her column Museums of Italy. So, since our tim...
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As a technician, since my job is that of web designer and web developer, before that of popularizer, I have been asked to comment on the new project of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, verybello.it, the site that was launched in the last few hours ...
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If there are occasions when the dichotomy betweenbeing andappearing that characterizes the actions of the politicians who govern us (clumsily, many would think) is best manifested, such occasions can be recognized in international summits. A bit like...
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While the world of art history (including us) debates even animatedly about Marco Goldin's exhibitionrapanettone going on in Vicenza, much more disturbing but equally Goldin-like events are taking place a few kilometers away, namely in Treviso. Vic...
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RAI is finally bringing us great art in prime time thanks to the project Bernini's Freedom, an eight-part series that, through Tomaso Montanari's narration, takes the reader through the work of one of the greatest protagonists of Italian art, Gian ...
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If your name is Gentile da Fabriano, you have the wealthiest citizen of Florence as a client, and to execute your work you therefore have all the resources you need at your disposal, all you need to do is to put your innate talent and taste for decor...
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I have a feeling that this 2015 will bring a new cliché about art. Namely, "every exhibition deserves to be seen." A commonplace that, formulated in different variants, is gaining more and more ground. The latest to have formulated it is journalis...
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As is often the case, when it comes to tourism, ideas are likely to be few and far between, but quite confusing. Today, in the Corriere della Sera, a nice interview with Minister Dario Franceschini came out, who gave us his recipe for moving tourists...
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As a child, I routinely refused to watch Disney's movie Fantasia: the one that, as you may remember, was divided into several episodes based on famous pieces of classical music, directed by Leopold Stokowski. Shortly before the end of the film, there...
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In recent decades, there have been many authors and intellectuals who have feared the dangers of a world that despises and puts the humanities on the back burner. This is not the place to discuss the importance of the humanities, and as long as arts ...
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Who knows what Francis Haskell (1928 - 2000), the unforgettable English art historian who was perhaps the one who more than any other opposed the practice of box office exhibitions, so-called blockbuster exhibitions or even, much more simply, unneces...
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Tracy Chevalier 's novel and Peter Webber's subsequent film, starring an outstanding Scarlett Johansson as the protagonist, helped bring the work into the public imagination. Last year's controversial and controversial exhibition in Bologna, curated...
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Dismemberment. [smem-bra-mén-to]. "s.m. 1. Action of dismembering. 2 fig. Division, disintegration of that which constitutes an organic and natural whole." This is the definition of the term dismemberment according to Aldo Gabrielli's Grande Dizio...
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In an interview with AgoraVox at the height of the election campaign, the current mayor of Rome Ignazio Marino declared that his intent was to "remake Rome as a place of culture, innovation, meritocracy and secularism." There would be so much to disc...
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Our readers accustomed to posts about art and culture will forgive us if we continue to talk about theCarrara flooding, but it affects us very closely and, as they can well imagine, we are really taken. In these hours the emergency is receding and we...
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When Antonio Canova created, at the invitation of Josephine de Beauharnais, his celebrated Three Graces, he actually succeeded in setting off a challenge, and the theme of the Graces represented an important test for many artists of the time: the fir...
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There has been a lot of discussion in recent days about Minister Dario Franceschini 's statements about the possibility of paying taxes with works of art: an outing taken by most as a proposal or an idea, but in fact an idea it is not, since there is...
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It is something that has been little talked about (and, therefore, few people know about), but this Tuesday the Magna Carta Foundation, chaired by Ncd parliamentarian Gaetano Quagliariello, presented at the Rome Chamber of Commerce, in the presence ...
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The initiative A Work of Art in the Classroom has yet to get off the ground, but it has already raised, at least on social media, numerous questions and several controversies. But let's go in order. Meanwhile, what does the project wanted by Minister...
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This morning I found myself reading a precise and timely article in the Huffington Post written by Michele Dantini about the negative opinion of the MiBACT commission on the transfer of the Riace bronzes to Milan in view of the Expo. Meanwhile, the...
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It was June 24, 1894, when, in Lyon, Italian anarchist Sante Caserio murdered French Republic President Marie-François Sadi Carnot with a stab wound to the heart. They did not have time to pass two months that Sante Caserio, immediately captured a...
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The news of Cristina Acidini's resignation as Superintendent of the Polo Museale Fiorentino has created some turmoil in the environment. Let's be clear: Cristina Acidini is a very serious and respectable art historian, who during her tenure, however,...
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Those who have been following our podcast on Paolo Veronese (or those who have been to the exhibition dedicated to him in Verona), will surely know that in the last section of the exhibition set up at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia, it is possible to...
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There was much discussion in mid-August about an article in the Telegraph by travel journalist Oliver Smith, provocatively titled 21 Reasons Why I Hate Museums. Now, I don't know if this is how much this corresponds to Oliver Smith's actual thinkin...
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The National Museums of Lucca, which are already having a rough time of it, are subjected these days to at least two crossfires: those of Stefano Cecchi, editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Nazione, and Klaus Davi, who has proposed (without anyone ha...
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That Guercino 's Madonna with St. John the Evangelist and St. Gregory the Wonderworker was stolen, everyone knows by now: after all, art history is wont to make headlines in the mainstream media either when there is a million-euro sale at some au...
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And wanting Monsignor Massimi an Ecce Homo that would satisfy him, he commissioned one from Passignano, one from Caravaggio and one from Cigoli, without the knowledge of the other; all of which, having been finished and compared, he liked his more th...
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We have already discussed that the Riace bronzes adorned with boas and leopard-print loincloths create more harm than good for the fight against homophobia: adorning ancient statues according to the most boorish homosexual stereotypes, in fact, does ...
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July 28 was Marcel Duchamp's birthday: he was the first artist to revisit a masterpiece of the past in a desecrating way to denounce thehypocrisy of contemporary society. It was 1919, Duchamp's work was L.H.O.O.Q., his gesture scandalized the well-wi...
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In the famous final scene of the 1988 film Fantozzi va in pensione (Fantozzi retires),Italy's most famous accountant, retired but prey to nostalgia for when he used to work and eager to resume his now old daily routine, makes a pact with the Mega-Dir...
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One could not understand neoclassicism without referring to the figure of the main theorist of this movement that developed in the second half of the 18th century and also distinguished much of the following century: we are talking about Johann Joach...
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I make no secret of the fact that here at Windows on Art we greatly appreciate the figure of Tomaso Montanari: for his intelligence, for his stubbornness, for his meritorious work in defense of the country's cultural heritage, for the fact that he is...
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To comment on the MiBACT reform presented on July 16 by Minister Dario Franceschini, I will begin with a statement by the minister himself, made on the same day the reform was presented. Said the minister the other day,"in Italy we have gold mines ev...
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A few days ago I told you about the forgettable exhibition that was organized by theAcademy of Fine Arts in Carrara as part of Marble Weeks. It is worth devoting a post precisely to Marble Weeks, which is considered the most important Carrara art rev...
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In Carrara, the 2014 edition of Marble Weeks began a few days ago, and in yet another highly original way, there was an exhibition on the plaster casts of theAcademy of Fine Arts. The third in the last four years-I'm just amazed that last year they s...
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The day before yesterday a nice article came out in Repubblica in which Antonio Natali, director of the Uffizi, wrote that the museum people and the exhibition people seem to be two different entities. On the occasion of the exhibition on Pontorm...
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Finally some real art was seen in Carrara. Although it was very short-lived and we at Windows on Art didn't get to see it in time. I'm referring to the installation Marble R.I.P., conceived and created by the two artists Robo (stage name of Rober...
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The performance that Milo Moiré gave in Basel at the contemporary art exhibition Art Basel caused a stir: the artist showed up at the entrance to the fair completely naked, and with the names of the clothing worn on various parts of the body writt...
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Let's say that for the first live tweeting of Windows on Art we were hoping for slightly more interesting topics. But the fact remains that the first live tweeting that we conducted on our Twitter profile took place this morning on the occasion o...
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One of the most important lessons left to us by George Brummell, the greatest dandy in history, is thatelegance consists in being inconspicuous, inconspicuous. So, it goes without saying that we certainly cannot speak of elegance for the setting ...
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Were it not for the fact that the story is true, there would also be laughter. But it really happened: Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, curators of the exhibition Bernardino Luini and His Sons, running until July 13 in Milan (at the Palazzo Reale),...
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Finally Carrara had a noteworthy artistic event. We are talking about Carrara Studi Aperti, which took place on May 31 and June 1: it was an event in which artists working in the city opened their studios and workshops to the public. We at Finestre s...
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It wasn't enough to have the big ships passing through St. Mark's basin every day, prompting Venetians to hope and pray that nothing bad would happen. It wasn't enough the waffling and intrusive tourism that has turned Venice into an amusement park, ...
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A huge stir has been caused by the news that Englishman Damien Hirst will exhibit one of his sheep in formaldehyde at Icastica, an exhibition to be held in Arezzo in a couple of weeks. Mind you, the operation of Hirst, who is used to putting dead ani...
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Last Friday, that is, the day after the meeting of the Council of Ministers in which the decree law for culture was approved, I scoured the entire Italian government website looking for the text of the decree law-a waste of time, because the text...
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On May 13, an article signed Alessandro Zangrando and titled Why we like Goldin's art appeared in Corriere del Veneto. I am glad that the journalist had a good experience participating in the exhibitions in Vicenza and Bologna, organized by the indef...
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Although almost two weeks late, I managed to take a look at Andrea Casadio 's report on the Uffizi that Servizio Pubblico, the La7 program, aired on the evening of May 1. Those who had not yet watched it should know that they can employ the eleven mi...
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In English, the word manager basically corresponds to the Italian word dirigente. Indeed: it is its most immediate translation. Except that in the common meaning (or rather, in the meaning common to politics and journalism, which is then reflecte...
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The work never stands alone; it is always a relationship. To begin with: at least a relationship with another work of art. A work alone in the world would not even be understood as human production, but looked upon with reverence or horror, as magic,...
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On Saturday, April 19, Giuseppe De Tomaso, editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (one of the most important newspapers in southern Italy), signed an editorial regarding one of the measures of the Renzi government's tax we...
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Oscar Farinetti is a guy who, without making too many mysteries, we do not particularly like. In fact, far from it. To understand the character a bit, one would only have to enter any of the Eataly stores scattered a throughout the country (and for...
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Were it not for the fact that the project will be financed in large part by public entities, there would also be smiles. There has been talk in Mantua for some time about the project that yet another archistar (by the way: what a horrendous term) who...
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In a well-known photograph taken by Guido Harari, the great Fabrizio De André is portrayed on his bed in his home, reading a newspaper, with his guitar at his side and a whole series of books and objects (pens, pencils, notebooks, a telephone... )...
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The word dialogue, when used outside of proper contexts, is one of the ugliest and most overused words in the Italian language. Increasingly, in the world of culture (or pseudo-culture), but especially exhibitions, the term dialogue is invoked almost...
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After A cosa serve Michelangelo?, released in 2011 and of which, moreover, you can find the review here on Finestre sull'Arte, Tomaso Montanari returns to bookstores with another book that helps us to better understand the history of art today: we a...
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No, we have not gone out of our minds and do not think that superintendencies are useless, on the contrary: their importance is fundamental, and former minister Massimo Bray also reminded us of this just yesterday in an article published on his websi...
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One of the best feelings after a fencing competition (since this writer has been practicing the sport for years) is to strip down, grab a nice packet of bubble bath in your hand, and jump into the shower. Because it is to be expected that in places e...
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On March 5, 1696, one of the greatest artists of the 18th century, Giambattista Tiepolo, was born in Venice: an anniversary that today is also celebrated by Google, which dedicates its doodle to the Venetian artist, creating a composition inspired b...
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Let's face it: after all, although the chances were slim, we were holding out hope that Matteo Renzi would at least give us the grace to remove Ilaria Borletti Buitoni from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Instead, not only has she been confirmed,...
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... and write a book about it. Well, there are those who have managed to find a logical thread that unites these characters, and also to make a literary work out of it all: the author of such an exciting work answers to the name of Simone Caffaz,...
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Over the past few days, our Facebook walls have been almost clogged with hundreds of comments from users concerned about the fate of art history in Italian schools: all stemming, probably, from an article posted on February 5 on the website Bloggokin...
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Tomorrow, in the late afternoon, I and my friend Fabrizio Federici, an art historian of well-known skills, titles and competences, as well as admin of the beautiful Facebook page Mo(n)stre, will be received in Carrara, in the town hall, by the Co...
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These days the hashtag #arteascuola is gaining popularity on Twitter: those who participate create thoughts (somewhat along the lines of what was done in elementary school) in support of teaching art in school. A practice, that of cause-related tweet...
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One of the most interesting scenes in Paolo Sorrentino's film La Grande Bellezza, which just a few days ago won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, presents itself to the viewer about a quarter of an hour after it begins. It is an artistic perfor...
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The history of art, even and especially when it is presented without thatmysterious halo that marketing nowadays necessarily wants to assign to it in order to make it seem more appealing, always turns out to be a subject that is as fascinating as eve...
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Ever since I read about a demonstration by cultural professionals scheduled forJan. 11, I have felt what I might describe as a mixture of skepticism and good hope: has the most fragmented and least cohesive working class in Italy finally found the st...
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The Esselunga project in Mantua has been much talked about. The intention is to build in the Porta Cerese area, close to Palazzo Te, a supermarket of the chain that will replace the old and dilapidated sportshall1. Summing up what has been said in re...
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As those who have been following this site for some time will have well guessed, one of my favorite reads when it comes to current events related to art-historical heritage is Tomaso Montanari's blog, which just yesterday brought out a post entitled ...
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I watched a few days late the interview with Massimo Bray conducted by Fabio Fazio on last Sunday's episode of Che tempo che fa. I do not want to say that I would have done better to have spent these 18 minutes and 28 seconds on other activities,...
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Of the ideas that Matteo Renzi, fresh winner of the PD primaries, has about culture, we spoke this summer, in an article that moreover we are circulating in these hours on social networks, and which is achieving great success (today we marked the his...
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In Italy it has become increasingly difficult to find the right people in the right places when it comes to public bodies or at least bodies chaired by publicly appointed people. For example, someone who understands agriculture to be in charge of agr...
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My article about Repubblica 's research on museum websites aroused the interest of some insiders (which can only make me happy), including Dr. Caterina Pisu, museologist as well as coordinator of the Research and Communication sector of the Nationa...
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A few days ago, November 23 to be exact, a kind of "survey" of museum websites came out in the pages of Repubblica. The title of the article that presented the results is a whole program:"Ugly and inhospitable, here are the Italian museums on t...
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In an article that appeared Saturday in IlPost1, PD MP Ivan Scalfarotto had his say about a very sensible open letter written by Salvatore Settis to the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Angelo Scola, asking him to stop work on thepanoramic elevator be...
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The very low level of sympathy for this event is already evident from the name that some lofty mind thought of giving it: States-General of Culture. It is reminiscent of the assembly of the social classes in pre-revolutionary France (and we all know...
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"We chose not to present a particular title but to focus on high science popularization. For this we will have a meeting with Roberto Giacobbo on Saturday." Did I read that correctly? At the same time the terms "high popularization of science" and "R...
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I learned only today (unfortunately late), through a post by Sergio Momesso of Art Histories, of the untimely death of Hasan Niyazi, one of the most followed art history bloggers on the net. Hasan Niyazi was the author of Three Pipe Problem(www.3pipe...
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And yes, we had seen bad ad campaigns, and lots of them. And in this sense MiBAC has been a master. We have seen Michelangelo 's poor David taken away by helicopters. We saw the young man in Francesco Hayez 's Kiss change partners and choose a girl i...
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On our Facebook page, whenever we try to draw the attention of our thousands of fans to current political events, we always receive criticism (by now it is mathematical) related to the fact that we should deal only with art and not politics. It is no...
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The destruction of Antonio Canova's plaster cast of TheKilling of Priam, which was shattered in early August during preparations for the staging of the Canova exhibition scheduled in Assisi from Aug. 10 to Jan. 31,1 continues to spark controversy abo...
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In the last few hours, in Il Fatto Quotidiano, art historian Tomaso Montanari has divulged some of the figures of the fee schedule for the concession of the Polo Museale Fiorentino 's spaces for events, a fee schedule that will be presented by Cristi...
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By now he has become a regular presence, not a day goes by that I don't see at least one appearance by Matteo Renzi on television or in the newspapers, so much so that when I don't hear news about him or see his jolly face on the news, I almost get w...
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Among the novelties proposed in the "Simplification" Bill approved yesterday by the current Council of Ministers, we find a content that has already provoked the first discussions at least on social networks and that (and this is little but certain) ...
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A few evenings ago I was discussing one of the topics that are in vogue when you find yourself having an aperitif with friends who have the same passion for art history as you, namely, yet another gimmick of Marco Goldin, who has always been seen as ...
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Before I begin my review of the book La Tavola Doria by Louis Godart, published by Mondadori, I feel obliged to thank the author for quoting me in a passage of the book in which he discusses Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari, the events of...
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Some of our friends, readers, and Facebook fans have asked us why we have lavished words on the appointments of Massimo Bray and Ilaria Borletti Buitoni but have made no comment on the appointment of Giancarlo Galan as chairman of the House Cul...
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For days now, the controversy over the Night of Museums, the event to be held on Saturday, May 18, has been lingering: through a Facebook post (later removed), the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in fact had asked for the support of volunteer organizat...
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Massimo Bray 's tenure at the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities certainly got off to the best possible start. In the meantime, he has shown his closeness to the art historians who will gather in L'Aquila this Sunday, May 5, for an even...
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In the end, the name that was chosen for the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities was that of Massimo Bray: originally from Lecce, born in 1959, the newly appointed minister studied in Florence, lives in Rome, and among his professional exper...
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In these hours during which the shortlist of names that will govern (so to speak) the country in the coming times is being composed (and, of course, it will be a government from which one should not expect the slightest change, given the names circul...
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Tonight, Fox Tv will air for the first time the Italian version of Da Vinci's Demons, a series dedicated to none other than the young Leonardo da Vinci.We wanted to see the first episode in the original language before it is broadcast in Italy, partl...
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It has been talked about in Massa for a while (i.e., since last summer): we too felt the need to say something about it, but we refrained from doing so because it seemed to be one of the many "summer ideas" so common in our parts, ideas that usually ...
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A few days ago, on our Facebook page, we made some timid attempts to start a discussion on the relationship between the 5 Star Movement and culture. It was our intention to delve into this topic with interviews: we therefore contacted three newly ele...
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Speaking in a broadcast ("Visitors") on a broadcaster in the province of Massa and Carrara, TT News, the vice president (as well as former director) of theAcademy of Fine Arts of Carrara Marco Baudinelli, as we read in yesterday's Tirreno newspaper o...
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Already on January 6, when FAI(Fondo Ambiente Italiano) launched its Culture Primaries, I had turned my nose up at it. I would like to point out that we very much support and appreciate all FAI activities, and moreover we have two FAI members, Riccar...
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The book I am telling you about today was recommended to me by a number of people, including one of the best friends of Windows on Art, namely Grace, whose advice was instrumental... ! It is titled Il segreto nello sguardo (The Secret in the Gaze), s...
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What does the greatest interpreter in sculpture of neoclassicism, namely Antonio Canova, have to do with one of the most important (and probably the most influential) groups in rock history, namely the Velvet Underground? Apparently nothing: in fact,...
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Reading through the proceedings of the 2011 Lubec conference, I happened to find some interesting food for thought on the topic of"museum and young people": although I arrive a year late, since we are referring to the 2011 Lubec, it is still a topic ...
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This one I am presenting today is one of those books that, once read, you will never tire of rereading and appreciating: I myself have read it three times. We are talking about A cosa serve Michelangelo? by Tomaso Montanari, a Florentine art hist ori...
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They are back on the attack: as all the newspapers have headlined, on the strength of no less than one hundred and fifty thousand signatures collected, Silvano Vinceti and his "team" have returned in recent days to call, with renewed insistence, for ...
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While looking for material to write the summary of the search for Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari, the wall painting that Maurizio Seracini and his team would like to find under Giorgio Vasari 's Battle of Marciano della Chiana in the Salone d...
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With today's book, one could say that we almost pick up the thread from the book we told you about last time, The Forbidden Books by Mario Infelise, because the events of Alexandra Lapierre's novel Artemisia (in Mondadori's Best Sellers edition) coin...
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On June 16, on the occasion of the feast day of Carrara's patron saint, St. Ceccardo, the so-called "Museo diffuso" in the historic center was inaugurated, or, to quote the words of the article published in the Tirreno newspaper on the same June 16...
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Over the years, I have developed the Ninja Turtles theory. This is the nice conclusion of Daniela, a fan of our Facebook page, about the media hype achieved by those few big names in art history. We were discussing, of course, the hundred Caravaggio ...
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Today we nonchalantly frequent sites such as Youporn, Playboy and so on without taking any risks, but once upon a time, as we all know, it was not so easy to access certain content, and two artists, for attempting to disseminate erotic images, risked...
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The church of San Domenico is located in one of the most beautiful corners of Arezzo: coming down from the cathedral on Via Ricasoli, we turn right and after a few dozen meters we see a tree-lined, little-visited square open up, at the end of which w...
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Today we are inaugurating the new space of Windows on Art dedicated to books: we will briefly talk to you about some books that we have read, that we think are interesting to share with you and that, of course, we recommend! Today we start by examini...
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Not infrequently we hear the incredible fable ofItaly holding 50% of the world's cultural heritage: the last time, at the 8:30 p.m. edition of TG2 last night(Thursday, May 3, 2012) and the protagonist was TG2 anchor Luca Salerno, who at minute 20'27"...
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Mais ne conviendrez-vous pas que la Peinture est également inventée pour l'agrément et pour l'utilité?
(But don't you agree that painting was invented for both pleasure and utility?)1
Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne
Lately there is a ...
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